THE FREEDOM CHARTER AND ITS RELEVANCE TODAY

Criticism of the Freedom Charter has lately been coming from a Committee calling itself the 'National Forum' and launched by certain individuals in South Africa as an organisational opposition to the United Democratic Front (UDF). At its founding conference, the National Forum adopted a number of resolutions as well as a 'Manifesto of the Azanian People,' which is meant to be an alternative document to the Freedom Charter. As reported by the Rand Daily Mail of the 13th June, 1983:

... A separate bid for unity has been started by the National Forum Committee, made up largely of Black Consciousness groups ... The National Forum, according to Mr Mkhabela of Azapo, is not an organisation but only a committee intended to facilitate joint discussions among black groups.

At the end of this National Forum Conference (there have been others ever since to ratify the 'Manifesto') the conference adopted the "Manifesto of the Azanian People" (which we shall hereafter refer to as the Azanian Manifesto), identifying 'racial capitalism' as the real enemy of the oppressed people of South Africa, and pledging to work~for the establishment of an 'anti-racist, socialist Republic.' Readers of the South African press will remember how even the Pace magazine issue of September, 1983 (a magazine that does very well in promoting showbiz but which dismally fails to give one a good political portrait of South Africa) commented about the 'historic' significance of the adoption of this Azanian Manifesto

'The oppressed people now have two documents setting out what the struggle is all about; the Charter on the one hand, and the Manifesto which follows the- Black Consciousness line, on the other.'

One cannot help marvelling at the inability of this magazine to comprehend the significance of the Freedom Charter in the history of South Africa. After 30 years of the adoption of our Freedom Charter, it is timely to examine its relevance in South Africa, and equally to examine some aspects of its latest critics and to evaluate the worth of their 'alternative' Azanian Manifesto.

Congress of the People

If the Pace magazine (which announced the adoption of this 'Manifesto' with an air of historical importance) imagines that the Congress of the People that adopted the Freedom Charter in 1955 was something similar to the National Forum Conference that was held in Hammanskraal from Saturday the 11th to Sunday the 12th June 1983, then it needs to research the historical facts thoroughly, and correct its distorted vision of history.

What were the circumstances, conditions, preparations and level of mass participation in the adoption of the Freedom Charter as different from the adoption of the Azanian Manifesto?

During the 1953 Queenstown Conference of the African National Congress the National Executive Committee was instructed to make immediate preparations for the organisation of a mass assembly of delegates elected by people of all races in every town, village' farm, factory, mine and kraal — to be known as the Congress of the People, whose tasks should be to work out a Freedom Charter for all the people and groups of the country.

According to a document entitled, Congress of the People that was annexed to the report of the National Executive Committee at the Tongati Conference of March 21st 1954 (where Chief Luthuli was banned and banished):

'The South African people's movement can be proud of its record of unbroken struggle for rights and liberty, but never before have the mass of South African citizens been summoned together to proclaim their desire and aspirations in a single declaration — a Charter of Freedom. The drawing up and adopting of such a charter of freedom is the purpose for which the Congress of the People has been called. Never in South African history have the ordinary people of this country been enabled to take part in deciding their own fate and future. Elections have been restricted to a small minority of the population; franchise rights, particularly in recent times, have been threatened and curtailed. There is a need to hear the voice of the ordinary citizen of this land, proclaiming to the world his demands for freedom.'

Indeed, the Congress of the People finally became the biggest single gathering of representatives of the people's grievances ever known in South Africa. How was this Congress of the People organised?

The Country Made Aware

Firstly, the whole country was made aware of the coming Congress of the People, and various organisers were given the task to imbue the masses of the oppressed people with the feeling of the tremendous importance of such a gathering. A zealous campaign of printed propaganda was launched, side by side with hundreds of meetings and house-to-house canvasses, as well as group discussions. The main purpose of this activity was to get the people to speak for themselves, and to state what changes must be made in South Africa if they are to enjoy freedom. Let us speak together of Freedom', said one popular leaflet 'and of the happiness that can come to men and women if they live in a land that is free. Let us speak together of Freedom. And of how to get it for ourselves, and for our children. Let the voice of all the people be heard. And let the demands of all the people for the things that will make us free be recorded. Let the demands be gathered together in a great Charter of Freedom.'

The leaflet called on all who loved liberty to pledge their lives to win the freedom that would be set out in the Freedom Charter

Every demand made by the people at these gatherings, however small the matter, was recorded and collected for consideration by the Congress of the People for inclusion in the Freedom Charter. In this way, the Freedom Charter became, not only in principle but also in actuality, the charter of the people, the content of which has its source in their homes, in the factories, mines and rural reserves. The task of the organisers of the Congress of the People (who were called Freedom Volunteers) was not to write the demands on behalf of the people, as the Azanian Manifesto was manufactured in Hammanskraal, but to collect them and to enlighten the people on the radical changes that such a campaign could make in the South African situation. By sneering at the Freedom Charter and calling it an ANC or even a Kliptown, document, some people forget that the Charter was in fact, produced not by the ANC but by the people of South Africa. The ANC only adopted this Charter as its policy document as advised in a Presidential address by Professor Z K Matthews, then acting on behalf of Chief Luthuli, who was banned and confined to the Lower Tugela district: 'I shall therefore not say anything about it (the Freedom Charter) at this stage except to remind you that the Freedom Charter was drawn up not by the African National Congress but by the Congress of the People, and it is therefore necessary for you to ratify the Freedom Charter and to make it part, if you so desire, of the policy of the African National Congress.'

Delegates to the Congress of the People subsequently came from all the four comers of our country. They came on foot, in buses, in trains — yes the whole trip to Kliptown near Johannesburg took place in an atmosphere a great political demonstration. Freedom processions greeted delegates in every town they passed through. As the call of the National Action Council had said:

'Where possible, Freedom Trains should be arranged to carry delegates but where funds are not available for this, delegates should band together on a Freedom March, even though it may take some days for them to reach the Congress.

Our people gathered together in Kliptown to speak of freedom. Of the total of 2 884 delegates, 721 were women. There were 2 186 African delegates 320 Indian delegates, 230 Coloured delegates, as well as 112 Whites. Hundreds of delegates were prevented from coming by the action of the police 'There were several wonderful things about the Congress of the People, said Professor Z K Matthews, 'the first is the fact that it was held at all. Here for the first time was a Congress which brought together people drawn from all sections of the population to consider and give expression to their vision of the South Africa of the future. The sponsoring organisations issue a challenge to any other group of organisations including the Nationalist Party to convene a similar conference and whether they could evoke an equal or better response from the people of South Africa.'

It was not the National Forum Conference, but instead the founding of the United Democratic Front, that evoked in the decade of the Eighties a response from the people of South Africa that was equal to the Congress of the People in 1955. As Ukusa reported (Vol. 2, No. 40, 1983):

'The meeting on August 20th to launch the United Democratic Front (UDF) is being described as a day of unity. Over I5 000 people from all over the country and all races came together under the banner of the UDF in Rockford, Cape Town, to reject the Government's new apartheid policies. A national executive of the UDF was elected from amongst 2 000 delegates representing community, worker, student, religious, sporting and political organisations. The delegates represented hundreds of organisations from Natal, Transvaal, Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Orange Free State and the Border region.'

Was it not Karl Marx who wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice? Indeed, even in South Africa, the dead of the Congress of the People rose up again — as Marx correctly had remarked in the same work:
'the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.'

Thus Dr Allan Boesak donned the mask of Professor Z K Matthews, for although the former could freely express himself on the recent conditions that prevail in our country and the necessity for change, his language was always translated back into the gathering in Kliptown, for in great historical events the new perform the tasks of the time in the costumes and traditions of all dead generations.

On the other hand, no sooner had the National Forum Conference been announced to the press, than it was rejected by four organisations that had been tricked into participation in it. This rejection of the National Forum came about immediately the participants started criticising the Freedom Charter and calling it all manner of derogatory names, even suggesting to the delegates that it was an antique piece ready to be deposited in a museum.The article in Pace magazine spelt this out clearly (pp.24-25):

'... Since 1958 (sic) the Freedom Charter has generally been regarded in black politics as the 'Constitution of the People' although there has always been a measure of dissent ... but this changed dramatically when in the fashion of the Congress of the People, the National Forum Committee called all the oppressed people to a meeting in Hammanskraal ... There have been documents before, but none ever caused as much of a storm and threatened to widen the gap between two political schools of thought among blacks as the Manifesto is doing ... Even the rift between the student organisation Azasm on the one hand and Azaso and Cosas on the other, seemed to widen further as they were forced to take sides. Cosas and Azaso declared their commitment to the Charter while Azasm stood for the Manifesto. In fact, organisations which support the Manifesto do not even regard the Charter as an alternative. As far as they are concerned, it is already in the archives and not worth a debate.'

This criticism of the Freedom Charter at this Conference (as already pointed out) led to the South African Allied Workers' Union (Saawu), the General and Allied Workers' Union (Gawu), the Congress of South African Students (Cosas) and the Azanian Students' Organisation (Azaso) dissociating themselves from the National Forum and issuing to the press the following statement, which was printed in The Sowetan of the 24th June, 1983:

'We reiterate our uncompromising commitment to the historic Freedom Charter as the only democratic document drafted in the history of the liberation struggle. The Charter stands out from all other alternatives for change in South Africa, not only because of the manner in which it came into being, but also because of the demands reflected in it. It can therefore, never be substituted without the will of the majority. Any attempt by an individual or group to discredit or undermine it can only be seen as an act of betrayal of the aspirations of all the people of South Africa.

It is noteworthy that the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress saw the need to address the people of South Africa and to warn against this anti-Freedom Charter trend, which poses as a super-revolutionary and 'socialist' phenomenon. In the June 26th statement of the same year, the NEC said:

'We further call on the struggling people of our country to be vigilant in the face of the determined efforts of those who, while posing as socialists, champions of the working class and defenders of Black pride, seek to divide the people and divert them from the pursuit of the goals enshrined in the Freedom Charter. Through their activities, these elements show hatred for the Charter and for mass united action, no less virulent than that displayed by the Pretoria regime.'

The organisers of the National Forum Conference will most probably tell us that they were organising a forum for discussion and to create unity of the oppressed people against the Botha Constitution and the Koornhof Genocide Bills. There is not the slightest doubt that any attempt at unifying the oppressed people for a determined struggle against the fraudulent constitution and death bills is a good thing. No one is arguing against the fact that the building of unity is and remains the paramount task for all politically conscious South Africans irrespective of their ideological persuasion. But the banner of 'Unity' must not be a false signboard; the cry for unity must not be made to conceal disuniting activities and intentions, which, it is hoped, the masses of our people will not be able to see.

At the height of the efforts to form a united front of lovers of freedom and democracy to oppose the Botha constitutional fraud, when the masses of our people were rallying around the Freedom Charter, when everyone was moved by the desire to preserve people's unity against oppression and to demonstrate the political strength and the moral prestige of our freedom struggle in the formation of the United Democratic Front — at this very time, the National Forum Committee suddenly, without the slightest apparent need, called for a conference to adopt some 'Manifesto of the Azanian People.' Can such an effort be called unity?

As for the critics of the Freedom Charter, for them to flout the decisions of a truly representative historic Congress of the People, which drew up the Freedom Charter, and equally to disregard the overwhelming democratic opinion of the mass movement at present taking shape in South Africa, for them to dissociate themselves from those solemn demands for people's democracy, is to advocate, at best, opportunism and, at worst, functionalism.

The Freedom Charter, e' Uniting Force

The Freedom Charter is a statement of aims, it is a definition of the goals of our liberation movement, it is the sum total of our national democratic aspirations and the new democratic life that we need. On the basis of the Freedom Charter are founded the corner-stones of our principles of freedom and democracy. The Freedom Charter attempts, as Chief Albert Luthuli said in his biography, Let My People Go:

'To give flesh and blood meaning in the South African setting, to such words as democracy, freedom, liberty. If the Charter is examined it will be seen that freedom means the opening up of the opportunity to all South Africans to live full and abundant lives in terms of country, community and individual.'

The defeat of the racist regime of South Africa depends on every fighter for freedom grasping fully the meaning, significance and purpose of the Freedom Charter. The Charter is no patchwork collection of utopian demands, it is no jumble of reforms clothed in socialist rhetoric, but a uniting force of all the people struggling for democracy and for their national rights; it is therefore a mirror of a South Africa yet to be won. Its ten clauses expose our national oppression by a racist autocracy and our national exploitation by foreign imperialist interests. Since its adoption in 1955, the Freedom Charter has crystallised the ideological trend of the progressive movements in South Africa.

It is a revolutionary document indeed because its implementation is impossible without the complete dismantling of the whole State of white supremacy and the political and economic foundation on which it is founded. Approached in a proper spirit, the Freedom Charter is indeed a uniting creed for those who want liberation in South Africa. It is with this reason in mind that Nelson Mandela wrote in an article, Freedom in Our Lifetime in Liberation of June 1956:

'Few people will deny, therefore, that the adoption of the Charter is an event of major political significance in the life of this country ... Never before has any document or conference been so widely acclaimed and discussed by the democratic movement in South Africa. Never before has any document or conference constituted such a serious and formidable challenge to the racial and anti-popular policies of the country. For the first time in the history of our country the democratic forces, irrespective of race, ideological conviction, party affiliation or religious belief have renounced and discarded racialism in all its ramifications, clearly defined their aims and objects and united in a common programme of action.'

Yet for the advocates of the Azanian Manifesto this political stand of the Freedom Charter is not revolutionary enough, for they, as the masters of the theory of socialism, want to bring about a socialist workers' republic in 'Azania'! Says the general secretary of Azapo in the October issue of Drum magazine:

'The problem with the Charter seems to be that it is co-optable by the capitalist structure. The Manifesto of the Azanian people is socialist. The Charterists have a block ... they get into a dead end street.'

Yes, it is true, as we shall demonstrate in greater detail later, unlike the Azanian Manifesto (which pretends to be socialist), the Freedom Charter is not a socialist document but a national democratic document. The Freedom Charter is based on the historic realities of our country, and one of those realities is that all black people, workers and non-workers, are nationally oppressed and are consequently involved in a national democratic revolution. The Freedom Charter thus asserts the necessity for the creation of a people's government as a principled alternative to racist apartheid rule.

Political struggle is not a game of rag dolls. What appear to be rag dolls to our anti-Freedom Charterists are actually people, men and women struggling against Pass Laws, Group Areas, Bantu Education, land dispossession, fascist brutality, low wages, super-exploitation, and so on; in short, fighting for national freedom and democracy. To ignore this, to favour only the production of slogans that correspond more with one's fancy than concrete reality, would be childish playing at politics, and irresponsibility.

Perhaps the protagonists of the Azanian Manifesto are sincere socialists and not 'ideologically lost political bandits' as Zinzi Mandela called them — however, their probable sincerity is not the point. We know of a lot of socialists in South Africa who have great respect for our Freedom Charter, and equally (if not more than anybody else) who fight for its realisation. The point is, why do the 'socialist' gentlemen of Azania scorn a democratic programme for a people's republic? Why do they (for the sake of socialism) want to skip the national democratic revolution, skipping the political interests of the people as a whole?

The real essence of the present phase of our revolution is not the winning of socialism but, as the Freedom Charter reflects, the winning of people's democracy, a true republic with power to the people, all the people! The drafters of the Azanian Manifesto fail to see the revolutionary significance of this step, that is, the significance of the struggle for true national independence and self-determination.

The Ideological Struggle

Imperialism maintains itself in power today not only through force but also by ideological manipulation. The real aim of imperialism in the ideological field is to mislead our people, to cause a split in our ranks, to attempt to diffuse our people's revolutionary zeal into an impotent quest for reforms. Not unusually, quasi-leaders are groomed, miseducated and let loose to carry out these plans.

In view of this it would be ridiculous to ignore the fact that those who oppose the Freedom Charter become toys in the hands of imperialism.

Everything must be done to enlighten our people, to equip them with tools to understand the line of march and thereby consolidate our democratic ranks. The imperialists, quite obviously, hate our Freedom Charter, and would love to see the South African people opt for a less revolutionary document, some kind of reforms or even, for that matter, one document that looks super-revolutionary in form but which is reactionary in essence.

In view of this ideological offensive against our national democratic movement and its attempts to discredit the Freedom Charter, it becomes imperative to ask the question: are there ideological trends in the national liberation movement? The answer is: Yes. Those of us who have experienced factionalism during the long years of our struggle against oppression have also found that the oppressors always try to foment splits in the national liberation movement on ideological and other grounds — using as their main instrument racial prejudice, chauvinism, tribalism or anti-communism. The question of ideological struggle is therefore not an abstract one, nor of purely academic interest. It is inseparably linked with the national liberation struggle, and is in keeping with the day-to-day historical demands of our revolution.

ANC Position Must Be Defined

Even in South Africa, where national oppression seems to dictate to all oppressed people the inevitable need to unite and agree on what to fight for there are always remarkably different ideological trends. And our movement owes its present shape and position to the bitter struggle it has fought over the years (even within itself) for ideological clarity against narrow national opportunism, liberalism, ultra-left Trotskyist childishness, and so on. Our real life and actual history has meant exactly this ideological struggle.

Chief Luthuli said, in a special Presidential message at the end of 1955: 'Faced as we are with the battle for freedom it seems a wise stand to say that the African National Congress should not dissipate its energies by indulging in internal ideological feuds — a fight on 'isms.' It is not practical and logical, however, to expect Congress to be colourless ideologically. She must in some way define or re-define her stand ...'

A struggle against a trend, therefore, which our entire movement recognises as an ideological trend contrary to the interests of genuine liberation, may imply superseding considerations of unity at all costs. And the history of our revolution has shown that the struggle for unity cannot be conducted at all costs, even at the cost of losing sight of the sacred goals we are striving for, at the cost of diverting from genuine emancipation. We take our orientation in this political sea, not by the ships sailing with us on the sea, but by a proven guide, a 'Northern Star,' an ideological lighthouse built on an historic foundation and developed within the strategy of the world revolutionary process. Unity, yes, but for the struggle against the colonial system of white supremacy, not for the establishment of ideological peace with opportunism.

Theory of Revolution

The strength of our ideological creed must therefore not only be in its unifying force, but also in its ability to withstand the test of factionalism and ideological opposition. Today when we look back at the political history of the ANC and its allies, it becomes quite obvious that our movement could not have preserved (let alone developed) itself as the vanguard organisation In the South African revolution had it not upheld the principle of ideological clarity and formed a single front in the political, economic and ideological struggle against settler colonialism and imperialism. The leading place of our movement derives also from our vigilant attention to the ideological aspect of the revolutionary movement of the oppressed masses. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. To defend such a theory, which to the best of our knowledge we consider to be true, against unfounded attacks and attempts to corrupt it is not to imply that we are an enemy of all criticism. We are defending unity against the disrupters of unity, we are defending the theory of revolution that has been historically proven.

The Struggle Against Opportunism

It is this political and ideological cohesion of our democratic movement which makes us stand as the leaders of all others, a position which is inconceivable without an irreconcilable struggle against political opportunism. The democratic movement that is developing in South Africa, inspired by the Freedom Charter, will retain and further develop its militant unity by also opposing opportunist ideological trends and correcting political mistakes at the level of the theory of our revolution, whether these are committed with good or ill intentions.

'Socialism' is undoubtedly the most fashionable slogan at the present period, for even our liberal 'friends,' and narrow nationalists, understand that it is the position one adopts to socialism, generally speaking, that differentiates a progressive from a reactionary in all countries. But it is very important (for our theoretically-grounded organisers) to give to our people a concrete understanding of the course our revolution will follow, that is, the stages it will necessarily pass through. It is such an understanding, based on the theory of the South African revolution, that will make it clear that the political situation in South Africa does not by any means make the question of the socialist revolution the immediate task of the struggle. It will make clear, instead, that our immediate aim is to win the objectives of the national revolution expressed in the Freedom Charter, more particularly to achieve the national emancipation of the Black people and to destroy the political and economic power of the racist ruling class.

Anti-Communist Hysteria

There must be some strange mechanism in the thinking of the imperialists which makes them believe that once they have described something as 'Communist' then all members of the human race will want to run away from it. The racists of South Africa have always thought like this. When, in 1956, the Pretoria government arrested 156 of our leaders and charged them with high treason, arguing that the Freedom Charter was a document inspired by Moscow, they hoped they would scare the masses of our people from the Freedom Charter. The masses, being oppressed by imperialism and racism, never moved in the hoped-for direction; on the contrary, they are irresistibly attracted by the Freedom Charter and almost everything that our enemies hate. In the end, the Treason Trial failed to diagnose Communism in the Freedom Charter.

Opportunism in South Africa has equally tried to call the Freedom Charter a 'Communist' document inspired by Moscow. It was the Liberal Party in the Fifties, typical of opportunism, which joined the racist government in opposing the Freedom Charter, and saw behind it a Communist plot. This party's anti-Communism found its extreme exponent in Jordan Ngubane, a journalist who finally broke with the ANC in late 1955 and became a leading member of the Liberal Party. The Freedom Charter's ultimate aim, claimed Ngubane, was 'to condition the African people for the purpose of accepting communism via the back door,' (An African Explains Apartheid, New York, 1963, p.99). He further charged that the Communists supported a deliberately vague document in order to accustom Africans to the idea of nationalisation. In a strange revelation of how liberalism and narrow nationalism ends itself embracing Pretoria's hatred of Communism Ngubane further wrote in his book (p. 179) that 'the African's and Afrikaner's hatred of Communism on this plane is so intense that an alignment between the two is no longer as remote an eventuality as events might suggest.'

Similarly, the PAC factionalists proclaimed that the Freedom Charter was a Communist document, in this way virtually joining the Pretoria government in proclaiming the moral justification for the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. And, as we all know, in terms of this South African legislation and judicial interpretation, a Communist is anybody who opposes apartheid, whether this is done in the form of a sermon from the church pulpit, a funeral oration at the graveside or anti-apartheid campaigning in the cultural field.

It is Apartheid that Robs our People

By diverting the attention of the oppressed masses from apartheid to their manufactured version of Communism, giving it a distorted meaning to suit their intentions, the racists and their ideological allies equally play the game of the imperialists; except that they never score goals in the hearts and minds of our people. Our people know that it is not Communism but apartheid that deprives them of their most elementary human rights; that it is not Communism but apartheid that robs them of their right to take part in the administration of their own country, that it is not Communism but apartheid that deprives them of a fair share of the wealth they produce, that it is not Communism but apartheid that deprives them of the right to live together with their families wherever they might choose, and live as human beings.

The Communist bogey has never deterred our people from upholding the principles of the Freedom Charter and the democratic movement led by the ANC and its allies. Contemporary events show irrefutably that, slowly but surely, our politically conscious people are marching with the banner of the Freedom Charter held high — holding high the banner of people's democracy. Such a people's movement is invincible! Such a people cannot be deceived! Such a people cannot be stopped in their tracks by some 'inspired by Moscow' scare gimmicks.

Why on earth do our enemies and opponents imagine that they are the only ones who know what Communism really is? Why do they think they are the only ones who store Marxist-Leninist literature on the bookshelves? Why do they imagine that the people of South Africa do not know what the SACP is and what it stands for? Do our enemies and the opportunists alike imagine that the members of the ANC do not understand the basis of the alliance with the South African Communist Party?

The Two Pillars of our Revolution

The Pretoria regime might have banned the SACP, but its history is well known by our people. Communist leaders such as Moses Kotane, J B Marks and Moses Mabhida have always been admired by our people. And the members of the ANC fully understand why both the ANC and the SACP are two hands of the same body, why they are two pillars of our revolution.

The South African Communist Party is the party of the working class, the disciplined and advanced party that has no interests separate from those of the working people. The Communist Party, basing itself on the science of Marxism-Leninism, inevitably works for a united front of national liberation. It staves to unite all sections and classes of oppressed and democratic people for a national democratic revolution (without making all such classes and peoples necessarily its members), to destroy white domination. It fights, like the ANC, to restore the land and wealth of the country to the people, and guarantee democracy, freedom and equality of rights and opportunities to all. From its founding conference in 1921, the Communist Party has demanded and fought for complete freedom and equality for the blacks, and has led the workers and oppressed people in numerous struggles against the Pass Laws and unemployment, against fascism at home and abroad. Such is the South African Communist Party as known by us members of the African National Congress and all honest patriots in South Africa. Members of the Party are not Russians or mysterious Kremlin agents as they have been slandered by imperialism and hated by the narrow nationalists; they are politically committed men and women in the thick of the South African revolution, who have worked hard to help build the ANC, the trade union movement and other people's organisations. As said the Statement of the National Executive of the ANC on the expulsion of the Group of Eight:

'Let it be made abundantly clear that the policies of racialism and anticommunism have been and still are diametrically opposed to the policies, traditions and practices of the African National Congress of South Africa. Pieces of legislation of the racist regime of South Africa, like the 'Suppression of Communism Act' were not only vigorously opposed by the ANC in 1950, but... never in any way deterred or changed the policy of the ANC regarding communism or its communist members and leaders. There certainly will never be an endorsement of the "suppression" of Communists within the ANC.'

The Manifesto of the Azanian People identifies 'racial capitalism' as the enemy of the South African people. It states:

'Our struggle for national liberation is directed against the system of racial capitalism which holds the people of Azania in bondage for the benefit of the small minority of white capitalists and their allies, the white working class and the reactionary sections of the Black middle class. The struggle against apartheid is no more than a point of departure for our liberation efforts. Apartheid will be eradicated with the system of racial capitalism. The working class, inspired by revolutionary consciousness, is the driving force of our struggle. They alone can end the system as it stands today, because they alone have nothing at all to lose. They have a world to gain in a democratic, anti-racist and socialist Azania ...'

What does this mean? The following second resolution of the National Forum Conference will probably give more light:

'That this National Forum notes that:
1. The struggle waged by the toiling masses is nationalist in character and socialist in content; ...'

A nationalist struggle and the socialist struggle are not one and the same thing, and they do not belong to the same historical period. The two represent two distinct categories of the revolution.

Nations in the Making

In history, it was the bourgeoisie that first fought and led the struggles for national consolidation against feudal seclusive principalities. Impelled by the developing productive forces, which also engendered corresponding bourgeois relations of production, the bourgeoisie brought together different nationalities into single nations around a common economic life. Nationalism, strictly speaking, has always been an ideological echo of this nation-formation process. Nations include both the national bourgeoisie and the working class of that nation. The latter, however, is exploited by the bourgeoisie of its own nation, and therefore struggles against this exploitation. It is in the course of this class struggle (led by a working class Party) that the working class of all nations learn of their common fate as a class. Proletarian internationalism, and not nationalism, therefore, is firmly connected with socialism and the irreconcilable struggle of the working class against all the bourgeoisie.

Scientific socialists actually teach the working class that their enemies are the bourgeoisie, including their own national bourgeoisie. National oppression, in fact, greatly hampers the solidarity action of the workers of the oppressed and oppressor nations, who otherwise should be struggling against their common exploiters, namely the capitalists. During the era of imperialism as well, the nation-formation process continues, but under conditions of the external economic and colonising forces, hence the national liberation phenomenon is the political struggle for self-determination of these young (often called developing) nations.

So, to talk of a nationalist struggle implies, most logically, a struggle that may be against imperialism, fascism or racism, as the case may be. But to proceed and say that the same nationalist struggle is also socialist in content is to make real confusion.

The reality is that the chief content of the present phase of our revolution is the national liberation of the black people. It is actually impossible for South Africa to advance to socialism before the national liberation of the black oppressed nation.

The drafters of the resolution of the National Forum and the Azanian Manifesto were unable to distinguish a national democratic revolution from a socialist revolution. And to talk blindly of an 'anti-capitalist' struggle at this phase demonstrates an incapacity to understand the urgent political question in South Africa, that of national liberation. To deny this in favour of abstract socialism is only a vain attempt to appear profound.

Socialist Consciousness

Have the National Forum gentlemen taught the toiling masses in South Africa about socialism? How then has the National Forum ascertained that our people are no longer fighting for national liberation, but for socialism now?

Socialism is a science and it must be conceived as such (said Engels repeatedly). To bring socialist consciousness to the working class is not a task performed once in some meeting of zealous university students; it is, most obviously, a painstaking task for serious working class organisers. It is therefore not enough to devote one's efforts to learning by heart all socialist slogans and then call oneself a socialist, or, equally, not enough to imagine that the 'toiling masses' should in all probability be struggling for a 'socialist content' by now, and not for national freedom.

The South African Communist Party, whose members are striving not only for national liberation but finally for the destruction of the capitalist system itself, also agree with the demands of the Freedom Charter, for they are quite aware that the black working class needs freedom from national oppression. Led by the ANC in alliance with the SACP, our people demand nothing less than complete transfer of political power to the people, which implies the immediate overthrow of racist autocracy, of the colonial state of national domination and its replacement by a state of the whole people.

A People's Assembly

To establish such a people's democratic republic in South Africa, it is absolutely necessary that the political sovereignty be vested in a revolutionary people's assembly, a constituent body of people's representatives elected directly on the basis of universal and equal suffrage, an assembly that shall have supreme authority and power to form a new constitution for South Africa. It is in pursuance of this political goal, one which cannot come about unless our democratic revolution has achieved complete victory over the apartheid regime, that our revolution is aiming at political seizure of power by the people.

A people's assembly that can have the power to create a new constitution for South Africa, and not merely to fit itself into a constitutional arrangement manufactured by the oppressor and the exploiter, can only be an outcome of a victorious mass insurrection, a conquering political and military force of the armed masses led by the African National Congress and the People's Army, Umkhonto we Sizwe. It is this kind of assembly alone, born of a revolutionary victory by the whole people, that is capable of achieving the aims of the Freedom Charter and subsequently of defending the new state of people's democracy against racist and imperialist counter-revolution.

We need to emphasise that those who do not rely on the armed masses in their political struggle will always seek to come to terms with the racist regime, with its proposed constitutions, and such people will not accomplish the aims of the Freedom Charter, even if they most sincerely desire to. Arguing in favour of establishing this new national order in tsarist Russia, as a necessary step before socialist revolution, a new order that would really express the will of the whole people, Lenin pointed out in The Two Tactics:

'The absence of unity on questions of socialism and in the struggle for socialism does not preclude singleness of will for a republic. To forget this would be tantamount to forgetting the logical and historic difference between a democratic revolution and a socialist revolution. To forget this would be tantamount to forgetting the character of the democratic revolution as one of the whole people: if it is 'of the whole people' that means that there is 'singleness of will' precisely in so far as this revolution meets the needs and requirements of the whole people ... The time will come when the struggle against Russian autocracy will end, and the period of democratic revolution will have passed in Russia; it will then be ridiculous even to speak of 'singleness of will' of the proletariat and the peasantry, about a democratic dictatorship, etc. When that time comes we shall deal directly with the question of the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and speak of it in greater detail. At present the party of the advanced class cannot but strive most energetically for the democratic revolution's decisive victory over tsarism.'

The anti-Freedom Charterists, however, tell us in their 'Manifesto' that the toiling masses are already struggling for socialism. The 'masses' of the National Forum, let us not forget, want socialism here and now, they are tired of waiting, that those struggling for a national democratic revolution and the demands enshrined in the Freedom Charter are only wasting their time.

A Common Will to be Free

The moment will come when the struggle against racist supremacy will end, and the period of the national democratic revolution will have passed in South Africa. Within the bounds of this national democratic revolution, however, there is a basis for all oppressed classes and strata having a common will; the Freedom Charter is such a common political will to be free.

Where does this common will for national liberation come from? Is the question of national liberation merely our fancy, or some kind of tactical choice among a number of strategic options? No, it is no fancy, it is no tactical choice — it derives from the historical fact that South Africa has not yet broken the chains of colonialism which held the African continent in subjection. The struggle of the rest of Africa, and that of South Africa included, is one and indivisible. South Africa is not some extension of Europe or America, but is part of the African continent, with its history of struggle against colonialism. In their fight against apartheid settler colonialism, our people are fighting to complete the African revolution.

From the time of the first white settlement, established by the Dutch East India Company more than 300 years ago, a pattern of colonial rule was initiated for the national oppression of the black people, which has never ended till today. During the wars of dispossession, the colonial forces drove the indigenous population from the best lands, and seized their cattle. They subdued them by armed conquest, and forced them into their service. The 1910 establishment of the Union of South Africa by British imperialism and the Afrikaner settler community was based on this dispossession and oppression of the African people, and was designed to deprive them of independence and freedom. Rather than making South Africa an independent state for the black majority, this constitutional arrangement reinforced and perpetuated their colonial status.

The Position of the Whites

What is the position of the whites? As the oppressor nation they enjoy privileges in South Africa. They monopolise nearly all political, economic, educational and social opportunities. What makes this structure unique and adds to its complexity is that the oppressor nation is not, as in a typical colonial relationship, situated in a geographically distinct mother country, but is settled within its border. The roots of the oppressor nation have been embedded in our country for more than three centuries, which makes the oppressor people alien only in the historic sense of origin.

The formation of the African National Congress in 1912 was the organisational manifestation of the urge of the oppressed nation to form an independent national state in the whole of South Africa, a matter that had been the privilege of the whites alone. It is the form and not the essence of colonialism in South Africa that is of a special type, so that we therefore have our own version of the situation in which the Portuguese or the British nation is oppressing the black nation. Colonial peoples are nations, too, in the sense that the world is divided into oppressed and oppressor nations and the former are not allowed the chance to develop all the characteristics or properties nations showed in their classical evolution in Europe under the bourgeoisie (hence the non-applicability of the 'nation' definition as given by Stalin). In so far as the colonial peoples possess this right to self-determination, that is, to political separation from colonial national rule (which may not necessarily imply geographical secession), there is the colonised nation's right to independence.

This characterization provides the theoretical foundation for the conclusion that the main content of the immediate struggle for change in South Africa is the national liberation of the black people. This means there exists an objective 'singleness of will' for the black people, irrespective of their class affiliation, to be free from this colonialism of a special type. National freedom in South Africa is not only in the interests of the black workers, but also of the black middle strata.

Apartheid colour bar determines the limits of the economic position of people in this stratum, in spite of whatever improvements they can have. In their daily life they come up against all the humiliations meted out to the black man. Unlike its counterparts in apartheid-free capitalist economies, the black middle stratum in South Africa, in the words of Slovo, 'faces a total racist bar against their entry into higher political and economic preserves of the privileged white minority.' This black middle stratum is quite capable of marching side by side with the workers and rural toilers in the national democratic revolution.

The Charter and the National Question

Does the Freedom Charter, by asserting the unity of the blacks and whites in the struggle for democracy in South Africa, and further claiming that South Africa belongs to all its people, black and white, deny the existence of the oppressor-oppressed relationship in our country? Does it equate the oppressor's interests with those of the oppressed? Are we equating 'the horse and the rider, as the Pan-Africanist Congress says?

There is nothing to suggest that the Freedom Charter denies the national contradiction in South Africa, the contradiction between the racist regime of national oppression and the oppressed black people. The Freedom Charter nowhere pretends that blacks are not oppressed and are therefore enjoying equal rights with their white countrymen.

The Preamble of the Freedom Charter first rejects the racist premise of the South African constitutional life, and recognises that the real South Africa is inhabited by all who live in it and consequently belongs, not to one section of the inhabitants. but to all of them. It then proceeds immediately to challenge the authority of a government founded on national oppression, by asserting that in South Africa there is a 'horse and rider' situation, and that 'our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality.' In this way, the Freedom Charter, in approaching the national question in South Africa, focuses unambiguously and accurately on the national relationship between oppressor and oppressed.

In other words, the Charter does not underestimate the urge of the oppressed black people towards the formation of a truly independent national state in South Africa, and their need to exercise the right to self-determination. The Freedom Charter, from every angle, asserts the right of the black people to political self-determination just as it is exercised by the white people, so that every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws.

But then the Freedom Charter is not like Jeremiah's Book of Lamentations, it is a political document that seeks solutions to the national oppression and inequality in South Africa; if it only mourned or interpreted our plight, and failed to suggest change and the manner of change that should be, it would cease to be a revolutionary document. The Freedom Charter proposes the solution of the national question in South Africa by the creation of a single South African nation, at present in the process of birth.

A Free Country, A Free People

We stand for a free South Africa, we maintain, for a free people who will enjoy equal rights whatever their colour, race or creed. It is for that reason that we are opposed to the narrow nationalism which would seek to create a caste society. The words, 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,' embody the principle that all people can live in South Africa whatever their colour, and that this is their right that will be defended constitutionally, not a mere privilege or favour extended to one section by another. The future constitutional law in South Africa shall guarantee and defend the right of all peoples that inhabit South Africa, irrespective of the colour of their skin, to South African citizenship, and such citizens shall live in equality and democracy. Our future constitution shall ensure that, unlike what it is today, South Africa shall not be a country divided unto itself and dominated by a particular national group. And those in our country who desire the ideals of genuine freedom, not chauvinist cocoons, will inevitably rally round the banner of the Freedom Charter. We must develop a revolutionary perspective of democracy that is uncompromisingly hostile to narrow nationalism.

While not a socialist document, the Freedom Charter nonetheless has these two dimensions: the present and the future. It neither loses touch with present realities — the robbery of our birthright — nor does it ignore future conditions, when present circumstances shall have been changed, when the two nations shall have fused and merged through the revolution into a single South African nation. While championing the cause of the oppressed black people, the Freedom Charter equally strives to create a single nation on South African soil, the most logical development in an economy that has reached the capitalist level of development.

These two distinct but closely interconnected dimensions of the Freedom Charter correspond to the historical fluidity of the South African situation. For this reason it would be incorrect to argue that the Freedom Charter cannot transcend the year l955, and to deny its relevance in the future, during the consummation of the national democratic phase of our revolution. This is clearly so, because the democratic demands it makes have not yet been attained.

United Democratic Movement

The Freedom Charter lays a revolutionary basis for a united democratic movement of all forces opposed to oppression, irrespective of racial affiliation. In this way the enemy is correctly defined, not as white people, but as a system of white supremacy and national domination; similarly, revolutionaries do not have to include the likes of Matanzima, Mangope or Mphephu, even if their pigment is blacker than coal. We sincerely question the honesty of a nationalist who claims that he strives to create a non-racial South Africa whilst showing an intolerant attitude to non-black revolutionaries. We question, even more, the sincerity of a socialist who creates a Chinese Wall between members of the proletarian class, thereby prettifying apartheid. With the same perception, one of the greatest black American leaders, Henry Winston, warned:

'Obviously, the go-it-alone neo-Pan Africanist skin strategy is but the reverse side of the white ruling class strategy in this country. The neo-Pan Africanist strategy objectively reinforces that of the monopolists, helps them retain power through manipulation of their twin weapons of racism and anti-Communism. While the ruling class promotes racist separatism for whites, the black skin strategists are busy working the other side of the street by advocating separatism for black people.' (Strategy for a Black Agenda, New York, 1973)

'Our new 'socialist' teachers of 'Azania' should have known in drafting their Manifesto that by simply leaving the question of the position of the white workers at the level of 'allies of the capitalists,' and further to maintain in their arguments that there is no place even for the serious democratic whites within the liberation organisations, they are travelling on the skin strategic path mentioned by Henry Winston. This is an even worse crime for people claiming to be socialists. The socialists that we are acquainted with are the kind that heed the words of Lenin, who once advised the Jewish proletariat that:

'We must act as a single and centralised militant organisation, have behind us the whole of the proletariat, without distinction of language and personality, a proletariat whose unity is cemented by the continual joint solution of problems of theory and practice, of tactics and organisation; and we must not set up organisations that would march separately, each going on its own track; we must not weaken the force of our offensive by breaking into numerous independent political parties; we must not introduce estrangement and isolation and then have to heal an artificially implanted disease with the aid of these notorious 'federation' plasters.' (Collected Works, Vol.6, p.335)

The other aspect of the national question that has led the National Forum to reject the Freedom Charter is the clause of the Charter that says, 'All national groups shall have equal rights.' In a 'theoretical' paper oscillating between narrow Black Consciousness and left-wing Marxist rhetoric, Dr Neville Alexander (who was obviously the chief theoretician of the National Forum Conference, since his paper was adopted into the Manifesto with precisely his formulations) told the Conference that they should reject this formulation of the Freedom Charter, since it is based on the concept of race, and a more revolutionary position would be one that 'opposes the perpetuation of the ideology and theory of race.' Proceeding from this theoretical premise, the National Forum has found worthy targets in the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses for 'their perpetuation of this four nation or race theory.'

Nosizwe's Fertile Imagination

The title of Nosizwe's book, One Azania, One Nation, has become the rallying slogan of the ideological trend that opposes the Freedom Charter. It is stated on page 97 of this book:

'It is immediately obvious that this idea of four 'national groups' has persisted from the pre-war caste interpretations of the national question which were shared, from different theoretical points of view, by liberals, many marxists and petty-bourgeois reformists.'

He calls this clause of the Freedom Charter 'the unambiguously liberal bourgeois formulations of the national question in South Africa.' (p. 100) and, further down the page, says 'the uncomfortably close parallel between Bantustan theory and the essentially pluralist theory of the Congress movement and the SACP, together with mounting criticism both inside and outside these organisations, has led in recent times to soul-searching and reassessment which may still prove to be of great significance to the whole liberation movement in South Africa.'

On page 103, he brings forth the following judgment:

'All in all, however, it does not appear that the Congress contributions to the continuing discussion on the national question have taken the matter much further on the theoretical level, and the patent confusions concerning concepts such as national groups, national minorities, racial groups, nationalities, bear this out clearly.'

What particularly annoys Nosizwe about this 'national groups' theory of the Freedom Charter is that:

'They (the ANC and SACP) really do perceive of the colour-caste groups, the four so-called 'racial' groups of South Africa, as nations or national groups who are nationally oppressed like overseas colonials. That national oppression can conceivably have a different meaning is not properly understood. It is understood in part, because the consistency breaks down at the fundamental point concerning the right of nations to self-determination.' (p.110)

There is probably no other theoretical question in the history of our liberation movement that has received as much attention as the national question. True, the initial positions might not have been those that are held today, but long before the existence of the Nationalist Party of the Boers and their Bantustan theory, long before their Population Registration Act, and even long before the Unity Movement came up with the theory that South Africa has one nation, the South African liberation movement worked out and adopted a systematic theoretical position on the national question in South Africa based on a concrete historical perspective, a history that is not only ignored by Nosizwe's One Azania, One Nation, but also which when he is forced to admit it, he dismisses from the point of view of revolutionism and places next to the liberals and the petty-bourgeois reformists.

All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights

Today both the ANC and the SACP recognise the existence of two nations in South Africa, the oppressed and oppressor nations, and to us it is from this division (one which forms the essence of imperialism) that our definition of the right of nations to self-determination follows.

This means liberation of the oppressed from national and colonial domination, and assertion of their national right to independence. The demand for the self-determination of the oppressed black people implies, not racial domination by blacks over whites, but, on the contrary, the creation of a non-racial democratic national state that develops on African soil, which then, for historical reasons, can only be overwhelmingly black (hence the correctness of the slogan of the 'Black Republic.')

This means that a victorious people's democratic revolution in South Africa will necessarily establish majority rule and, consequently, the correction of the colonial injustice whereby the black majority was made subject to the white minority. Again, this demand for self-determination does not mean the division of South Africa into black and white states, but is only an expression of the need for national freedom, an inevitable demand under national oppression.

And when our Freedom Charter says All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights, the Charter is giving a reply to the present racist policies of the apartheid regime, which has created social differentiation between whites, coloureds, Indians and Africans.

These groups at present differ in economic and even political privileges. In spite of the new Botha constitutional gymnastics, there are enshrined in the laws of South Africa a host of insulting provisions directed at the dignity of the black people and the humanity of the oppressed masses. In a free South Africa, as far as this clause of the Freedom Charter is concerned, a racist who shouts, 'Coolie', 'Hotnot' or 'Kaffir' shall be brought before revolutionary justice charged with violating human dignity.

When the Congress movement talked about national groups, it was not referring to nations, hence the principle of self-determination is not applied to these groups in the Charter. Nations, we know, came about only at a certain stage of productive development, whether such development was inherently dynamic or was imposed from without by colonialism; and nations, we know, are, as Lenin said, 'an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois epoch of social development.'

But what Nosizwe's learning in Marxism -has forgotten to tell him is that apart from nations proper, there exist what are called 'nationalities' or what the Freedom Charter calls 'national groups', and these are by no means the same as nations.

The Land Question

What were the policies of the National Forum Conference on the land question? Here is how the conference addressed itself to the question:

'And further noting that:

1. The usage of the land shall not be to the benefit of Azanians only but for the benefit of all Africa, the Third World and the international community as a whole.'

Such was the formulation of Resolution Two on the land question. This approach obviously sounds more evangelical than political. Does this suggest that South African land shall be free for use by everybody? Who are these people in Africa, the 'Third World' and the international community as a whole, who shall benefit from the usage of our land?

In the past and present history of South Africa, we have witnessed imperialist interests from foreign countries benefiting from our land. Obviously the socialist countries, because they do not have transnational companies exploiting the lands of other peoples, have not desired, and do not desire, to exploit our wealth. Imperialists, however, do! The South African rural toilers have been deprived of land ownership by a racist government, and yet the National Forum is telling them now that the usage of the land that should actually come back to them shall benefit the international community as a whole! And our rural masses are supposed to agree to that, to a resolution on their own land, made by some intellectual gentry without consultation with them, made behind their backs? Our rural people shall have nothing to do with this fuming of South African land into a garden of Eden for the international community as a whole.

How to Distribute the Land?

The land question is a very sensitive issue, one that needs to be approached with sober attitudes. The indigenous people of South Africa have fought bitter wars of resistance lasting hundreds of years because they were deprived of the land. Today in our country all the land is controlled and used as a monopoly by the white minority. The African people have always maintained their right to the land as a traditional birthright of which they have been robbed. In fact, the ANC slogan, Mayibuye i'Africa! is precisely this demand for the return of the African land to its indigenous inhabitants.

The white minority has no right to be land barons while we work for them as serfs. This is why the Freedom Charter says that The land shall be shared among those who work it.' If the present land barons and absentee landlords want to remain on the land, our Freedom Charter rules that it shall be a condition that they should, like others, till it. In practical terms, this means that the task facing our struggle on this question is to take this land away from exclusive white control, and to divide it among farmers who do not exploit the labour of others, but who shall work co-operatively to produce wealth from the soil. It is the landless peasants who till this land, and therefore it needs to be distributed among them.

Since the Freedom Charter is a statement of aims, it does not go into real depth as to what form this distribution of the land will assume. If our national democratic revolution is not aborted, if it does not miscarry, but finally ends as the revolutionary political power of the working class and the peasantry (the people), and if the leading working class is definitely to put its imprint on it, then we have no reason to believe that the land shall be distributed to individual capitalist farmers. We have reason to believe, instead, that land shall be distributed in such a way that collective farms are created to exist side by side with state farms to banish famine and land hunger.

And certainly this is very far from the assertion that the use of our land shall be for the benefit of the international community as a whole. A revolutionary democrat, one who understands the exact position in history and society that a victorious national democratic revolution occupies, will reject the contention that the re-division of our land will take us back to the era of individual landowners who will then step into the shoes of the departed land barons. A revolutionary democrat understands that, in resolving the land question, the peasantry is acting in close unity with its leading ally, the working class.

In The Two Tactics, Lenin argued:

'Without thereby becoming socialist or ceasing to be petty-bourgeois, the peasantry is capable of becoming a wholehearted and radical adherent of the democratic revolution. The peasantry will inevitably become such if only the course of the revolutionary events, which brings it enlightenment, is not prematurely cut short by the treachery of the bourgeoisie and the defeat of the proletariat. Subject to this condition the peasantry will inevitably become a bulwark of the revolution and the republic, for only a completely victorious revolution can give the peasantry everything in the sphere of agrarian reforms — everything that the peasants desire, dream of, and truly need in order to emerge from the mire of semi-serfdom, from the gloom of oppression and servitude, in order to improve their living conditions, as much as they can be improved within the system of commodity production.'

And the more enlightened the rural toilers become, the more consistently and resolutely will they stand for a complete democratic revolution; for, unlike the bourgeoisie in South Africa, they have nothing to fear from the people's revolution, but, on the contrary, stand to gain from it.

Let Our People Discuss the Charter

We, the upholders of the Freedom Charter, understand very well that no programme, no constitution, is immutable for all time. Conditions change, and so do attitudes. Even the most seemingly sacred or absolute principles or policies should be held constantly under review, endorsed if found still to be correct, altered or scrapped if found to be out of date.

Let our people discuss the Freedom Charter to check its relevance to the conditions of today, let those patriots who disagree with this clause, or that, voice their views in discussion. This is fine. Our liberation movement is not a church, it must never be measured by the criterion of some fantastic and infallible ideal, but should always be regarded as a practical movement of ordinary people. The Freedom Charter was drawn up by such ordinary people. But even those who might differ with this clause or that, must realise what the Freedom Charter actually is, from an historical point of view. Whoever differs with it should at least acknowledge that it is indeed a product of the people's democratic demands in the South African context, and that equally, developments from it have a corresponding historical magnitude.

We defend, fight and die for, the ideals enshrined in the Freedom Charter, not because it is an all-time document, but because it is a revolutionary guide to a life free of misery and oppression. It is the demands of the people, that have yet to be won. These are the kind of ideals which most nations achieve, ideals for which men and women stubbornly and heroically resist torture in detention and gruelling lives in exile, ideals for which our martyred dead stood firm and unflinching to the last minute of their lives. Such ideals cannot be taken lightly. Such ideals need to be d~d from malicious slanders and ill-conceived political theories.