THE FREEDOM CHARTER AND THE PROBLEMS OF FREEDOM: 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FREEDOM CHARTER AND THE CRISIS OF PROGRESSIVE POLICY-MAKING AND OF POLICY LEADERSHIP IN THE POST-NELSON MANDELA SOUTH AFRICA.

“Generally speaking, less importance attaches to the official programme of a party than to what it does. But a new programme is after all a banner planted in public, and the outside world judges the party by it”. Friedrich Engels, Letter to August Bebel in Zwickau, Mach 18-28, 1875.

INTRODUCTION

The occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Charter is truly a momentous event in the political calendar of democratic South Africa.

In following the advice of Friedrich Engels above, we need to attach great importance to the Freedom Charter, the programmatic vision of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and of most of the progressive political formations of South Africa, which was adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg in 1955.

Even more importantly, we need to judge the ANC of today not just against the ideals contained in the Freedom Charter, but by what it does in practice, beyond declaratory intent, as a governing authority over democratic South Africa since 1994.

But above all, we need to be able to relate the Freedom Charter, and what the ANC concretely does as a ruling party, to the ANC’s new signature long-term, strategic programme for the next twenty years (2010-2030), namely the National Development Plan (NDP), adopted by the South African parliament in August 2012.

I therefore cannot agree with Keith Gottschalk of the University of the Western Cape when he becomes agnostic about the ANC’s NDP when he states that “after the unbanning of liberation movements in 1990, the ANC elaborated the three-page Freedom Charter into a 50-page Ready to Govern paperback. Its 1994 election manifesto included 100-page Reconstruction and Development Programme, which further enlarged the charter”. (Freedom Charter’s lasting Legacy, The New Age, 26 June 2015).

What about the unwieldy 444-page NDP adopted by the ANC’s 2012 Mangaung conference, Keith Gottschalk?

No kinship to the Freedom Charter?

Really?

LOL.

Yet there is no escaping linking the NDP to the Freedom Charter, positively or negatively.

This is because, as Friedrich Engels would put it, the NDP has become the ANC’s “banner, planted in public, and the outside world judges the party by it”.

In my opinion, this is the best way to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Charter.

It is also the best way to evaluate the state of progressive politics in post-Nelson Mandela democratic South Africa.

And what do we see when assessing our troubled current political juncture through the prism of the refracted light of the historic and much-acclaimed Freedom Charter and the highly controversial and bitterly contested National Development Plan (NDP)?

Deborah A. Thomas, in the article ‘Modern Blackness – Progress, “America” and the Politics of Popular Culture in Jamaica’, which is part of the compendium “Globalization and Race: Transformation in the Cultural Production of Blackness”, tells a fascinating tale about how Jamaica’s black ex-slaves commemorated 50 years of their emancipation. This emancipation jubilee took place in 1888.

Five of these ex-slaves published a work under the heading ‘Jamaica’s Jubilee’ or ‘What we are and What We Hope To Be’.

Deborah Thomas writes that:

“In their attempt to refute the widespread belief that black Jamaicans were incapable of possessing ‘those mental and moral qualities so indispensably necessary to his rise in the scale of true civilization'”, the ex-slaves pointed to their progress in education, Christian religion, reading clubs, improvement societies, musical and social gatherings and legal marriages. (2006, page 337).

Deborah Thomas further states that:

“The ‘Jubilee Five’ also cautioned the readership against censuring Jamaicans for not having advanced further in the fifty years since emancipation, noting that ‘no other people could, under similar circumstances, have reached a greater height on the ladder of social advancement within the same period of time'”. (Ibid).

Similarly, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, as well as the 21st anniversary of South Africa’s democracy, a lot is made about the progress the government has registered regarding the first five clauses of the Freedom Charter to do with political demands, or our post-apartheid political and constitutional emancipation, if you like.

It is often said that the progress of the last 21 years in post-apartheid South Africa is proof that black South Africans can administer and oversee a complex First World economy. Much is also made about the delivery of housing, education, health, social wage and other social services by the democratic government.

But in assessing the last 21 years of our democracy and 60 years of the Freedom Charter, do we echo the sentiments of Jamaica’s black ex-slaves in ‘Jamaica’s Jubilee’ in 1888?

Do we see the progress of the last 21 years as a proof that we have climbed up the ladder of a white man’s civilization? Do we too often claim that we should be spared a harsh censuring by the readership of the Freedom Charter, the 1996 Constitution and the National Development Plan (NDP) for the slow progress we have made since 1994, especially with regard to the Freedom Charter’s all-important and superlative clauses to do with land redistribution and the transfer of mines and the economy to the ownership of all South African people, and not to continue to reside largely in the ownership of a white minority, because we think that no other nation on the African continent has registered a similar progress as we have in the last 21 years?

And how come we, like Jamaica’s ex-slaves in 1888, talk much about progress in any sphere of our democratic endeavors other than ownership of the economy and land redistribution, to measure the progress we have registered since 1994?

Do we in fact seek, just like Jamaica’s black ex-slaves fifty years after their emancipation, only “to refute the wide-spread belief” that we are indeed “incapable of possessing ‘those mental and moral qualities so indispensably necessary’ to our ‘rise in the scale of true civilization'”, as Deborah A. Thomas would put it, whilst leaving unattended and unchanged the basic apartheid-era land distribution and economic ownership patterns which deliberately exclude the overwhelming majority of South African blacks?

For the purpose of evaluating the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, as well as 21st anniversary of our post-apartheid democracy, it is worthwhile to quote Deborah A. Thomas at some length on what she termed “the problem of freedom”, so as to better understand why Jamaica’s black ex-slaves did not attain their full promise and potential following their emancipation in 1833:

“While these early leaders struggled for postemancipation economic and political development for the masses of Jamaicans, they nevertheless distanced themselves from these same masses both socially and culturally. This was, in part, a result of their own position within Jamaica’s late-nineteenth-century black middle class, a relatively unstable grouping of teachers, religious ministers, small-scale farmers, artisans and constables…This grouping would produce the professional strata of black Jamaicans whose ‘respectability’ and status were based on their education and their adherence to idealized Victorian middle class gender and family ideology rather than on the ownership of either land or other means of capitalist production”. (Ibid, page 343-344).

There is no doubt that the steady but increasing migration of the post-apartheid black middle class, the black bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the rent-seeking BEE moguls away from the black townships and villages to the formerly white apartheid suburbs is another demonstration of an attempt on their part to distance themselves from the teeming masses of the black poor and lower classes, socially and culturally, in order to lock out the latter from freedom’s economic benefit by kicking down the very economic ladder they used to climb into the world of much-vaunted white privilege in post-apartheid South Africa.

Most remarkably, one of the greatest sons of Jamaica, the much-decorated Jamaican-American, Colin Powell, who went on to become America’s first black National Security Advisor, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State, wrote (with Joseph E. Persico) his autobiography, My American Journey, in which he described how, a century after the emancipation of Jamaica’s black slaves, his grandmother, Gram McKoy, immigrated from Jamaica:

“To support her family, Gram left Jamaica in search of work, first in Panama, then in Cuba, finally in the United States. She sent for her eldest child, my mother, to join her. She labored as a maid and as a garment-district pieceworker and sent back to the children still in Jamaica every penny she could spare. She eventually sent for her youngest child, my Aunt Laurice, whom she had not seen for twelve years. To those of us spared dire poverty, such sacrifices and family separations are all but unimaginable”. (1995, page 8).

It is clear that the grandparents and relatives of Colon Powell back in Jamaica, who were forced to flee abroad to escape “dire poverty”, were part of millions of poor and low-class Jamaicans who lost out on emancipation’s economic dividend, which accrued mainly to the ruling political and economic elites and the middle class of black Jamaicans after emancipation in 1833, in the same way tens of millions of black South Africans are excluded from enjoying the dividend of economic freedom and justice of post-apartheid South Africa.

Like is the case in today’s Zimbabwe 35 years after its independence, a century after the emancipation of Jamaica’s black slaves, “dire poverty”, (to borrow an expression from Colin Powell), was driving hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jamaicans to leave their country “in search of work” and “to support family”.

The questions that need to be asked is: How much do post-apartheid black South Africans differ from postemancipation Jamaica’s ex-black slaves in respect of lack of ownership of land and or other means of production over a century ago? How do we make sure that we ensure a situation where, on the occasion of the centenary commemoration of the Freedom Charter in 2055, we or our future generations are able to boast that post-apartheid South Africa has done exceedingly better than Jamaica and Zimbabwe in ensuring that it has solved the problems of freedom of our people, and that it has not imbrued the lofty meanings of our liberties with the follies of petty bourgeois and narrow-minded middle class avarice, self-interest and egoism?

What has the African diaspora in the last century, including in Jamaica, taught the new black rulers of democratic South Africa, on the occasions of the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Charter and the 21st anniversary of our democracy, regarding true economic empowerment of liberated, post-apartheid black South Africans?

What are democratic South Africa’s most acute policy-making freedom problems? And what are optimal solutions for such freedom problems?

The full article can be read here.