Evolution of ANC policy – the Freedom Charter in context

• Nov 5, 2012
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Thabo Mbeki, in a speechⁱ titled “The Historical Injustice”, delivered at a seminar held in Ottawa, Canada, from February 19 to 22, 1978 and published in Sechaba, March 1979, begins by making a point that “… to understand South Africa we must appreciate the fact and fix it firmly in our minds that here we are dealing with a class society“.

A class society in South Africa has a large dose of racial content, as Mbeki (1978) quoted from the 1910 Annual Report of the Chamber of Mines on the advantages of converting black worker disenfranchisement into cash … that it “viewed the native purely as a machine, requiring a certain amount of fuel”. It decreed accordingly that the diet of the African miners living in the mine compounds should be determined in terms of the formula of “the minimum amount of food which will give them maximum amount of work”ⁱⁱ.

Mbeki (1978) quotes a South African Member of Parliament, GF Froneman, who is reputed to have said: “(Within white society, Africans) are only supplying a commodity, the commodity of labour ... It is labour we are importing (into the white areas) and not labourers as individuals ...”ⁱⁱⁱ

In this regard, Mbeki in 1978 defined the position that black people occupy as follows:

• They are the producers of wealth
• They produce this wealth not for their own benefit but for its appropriation by the white population
• They are permitted to consume part of this wealth, but only in that proportion which will “give the maximum amount of work” on a continuing basis

Mbeki (1978) argues that, if the ideal of the Freedom Charter – The People Shall Govern – were to be realised, since we shall have through our own struggle, placed ourselves in the position of makers of history and policy and no longer objects, we shall redefine our own position as follows:

• We are the producers of wealth
• We produce this wealth for our own benefit to be appropriated by us, the producers
• The aim of this production shall be the satisfaction, at an increasing level, of the material and spiritual needs of the people
• We shall so order the rest of society and social activity, in education and culture, in the legal sphere, on military questions, in our international relations, et cetera, to conform to these goals

For Mbeki (1978), the Freedom Charter represents the act of negating the theory and practice of white apartheid racism  “exactly to take the issue of colour, race, national and sex differentiation out of the sphere of rational human thinking and behaviour, and thereby expose all colour, race, nation and sex prejudice as irrational … Our own rational practical social activity, rational in the sense of being anti-racist and non-racist, constitutes such a negation; it constitutes the social impetus and guarantee of the withering away of this irrationality”.

Evolution of ANC policy