TRANSCRIPT: WELCOME TO OUR BOARDROOM
Having a separate ANC corresponded to the way people were actually living. We set up a Coloured People’s Congress, it was called. In other parts of the country, the South African Indian Congress was strong, with great traditions of struggle. When I went to Johannesburg, I would go up to Kholvad House and I’d meet Ahmed Kathrada. Then he was fiery, a big mop of hair, very passionate; Barney Desai and the others. It was another world but a world of revolution and struggle and passion.
And now we reach the stage, we’re in the ‘50s and there all sorts of whites coming along saying ‘I want to join, I want to join, what can I do?’. And some are communists, and some are anti-communists and some were church people and others were atheist from all over the place. And the ANC said, ‘Please, get your act together, form an organisation, take policy positions, we know where you stand. And you can join in, and you can work side by side with us.’ So, at the suggestion of the ANC, the Congress of Democrats was formed. And then we used the symbol of the four spokes of the wheel – so the ANC would be the central organisation and then it would be the South African Indian Congress, one spoke; the South African Coloured People’s Organisation; the other, and the Congress of Democrats.
There weren’t many of us. Helen Joseph was our most prominent personality. Most of us, I would say, were communists, either actively, working in the underground. I was recruited into the underground. It was a banned organisation. I never got a party card because you didn’t have party cards – that could be used in evidence against you. But I was very proud to be in this non-racial organisation. Part and parcel of what we saw as a worldwide struggle against imperialism, against domination, strongly for peace, against atomic warfare and in particular, anti-racist in the South African context. And that comradeship was very, very intense.
We would go up to Newlands Forest. And I remember one day it was raining and Fred Carneson saying, ‘Welcome to our boardroom.’ The boardroom was a big tree where the rain is a little bit cut off. And it would be Ray Alexander, great trade union leader, and Brian Bunting. We’d meet under that tree. Martin Hani (he wasn’t Chris Hani then), Archie Sibeko, Achmat Osman. I must say, we got through our agendas very, very quickly. If the cops were on to us, it would be like ten years jail for each of us. And then separating off into our different forms of transport. Very, very difficult, very dangerous. But that sense of carrying on the struggle – very, very strong.
I’d been away in the year 1954 in London, staying with my dad. I got my BA and I was about to do my LLB, the law portion, and I just felt the state was closing in. If I wanted to travel, that was the time to go. We all dreamt of going to Europe. We’d go down to the docks, and you’d see the Union Castle Liners, people up on board, throwing the streamers and the hooter would go ‘wooo’ and our hearts would go ‘wooo’. Somehow, it was like South Africa was a faraway country and we just had to, we had to, we had to travel to see what was called the world. And now suddenly I’m on that boat and I’m going out.
My dad was in exile. Solly Sachs, General Secretary of the Garment Workers’ Union, one of the first people to be banned by the National Party government. Banned meant it was a criminal offence for him to carry on with trade union work, to attend meetings, to address people. He defied his banning order on the City Hall steps in Johannesburg. Thousands of workers came, workers and supporters. And my dad came up on to the platform. The police wade into the workers, lots of pictures in the press of bleeding white workers, women workers, bleeding, bleeding from the baton charges. And Solly is marched off to the police station.
The joke afterwards was the workers followed, and they were saying: ‘We want sex!We want sex!’ The South African way of pronouncing ‘Sachs’, ‘Solly Sachs’. He was sentenced to jail; he took his own appeal to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. And he was actually praised by the judges for the quality of his argument – not surprising, he handled 23 law cases in his life as a litigant. He lost the first, he lost the last, he won all the others in between. They dismissed his argument and by 3 to 2, they suspended his sentence. So he didn’t go to jail. He went off into exile. And I spent the year staying with him.
So, I missed a lot of the mobilisation for the Congress of the People.
But 1955, I’m back. We’re choosing delegates to go. We know the police are going to try and stop people. So, the decision was taken, I would go as a newspaper person for The New Age newspaper, the weekly pro-ANC newspaper, as if that might give me some easier access. The nett result was I was sitting up at a table with the press at the time when, on the 2<sup>nd</sup> day, the police marched in. There must have been two and a half thousand people sitting on quite a hard floor, a makeshift stage behind us. Terrific emotion.
And we reach the stage now where we’re reading out the sections of the Freedom Charter one by one. And suddenly we notice the place is surrounded, police on horseback, others marching in with sten guns. If one stone had been thrown, people wouldn’t be speaking about Sharpeville, they’d be speaking about Soweto, Kliptown. But somebody stood up, started singing – beautiful, beautiful, beautiful singing. It was our affirmation, it was our discipline, it was our refusal to be provoked. We carried on announcing the sections of the Freedom Charter, adopting by acclamation. And eventually we were allowed out one by one. We had to give our names to the police. It took several hours. It was getting cool, it’s mid-winter in Johannesburg. But we felt somehow joyous and triumphant.
But one saw the two South Africa’s there. Sitting on the ground, the masses, the people, men, women, few whites, many people from the Indian community, quite a few people from the coloured community, overwhelmingly African, rural, urban, smartly dressed, less smartly dressed. And now the state, in uniform, with guns, trying to suppress the voice of the people.
The Freedom Charter had an enormous impact. Until then we’d been against, we were denouncing the pass laws and against Group Areas Act and against population registration, and against the Urban Areas Act that broke up families and so on. Now we were for something.
Z.K Matthews was very influential in launching the idea of the charter. I was told in America that he was actually encouraged to have a charter by Paul Robeson, who said, ‘The people in South Africa are saying what you’re against. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you said what you are for?’ Z.K came back from theology studies in New York with that idea and it took off after that.
There were three separate processes. The one was getting in the demands and sifting them and sorting them out. The second was the actual drafting committees, reducing them to a coherent set of principles that reflected what people were asking for. And it has a clarity and a simplicity and a lack of pomposity and long words that I think is quite admirable. And the third was the actual adoption. The adoption was done by the ANC and the Congress Alliance, but the ANC was the principal grouping. And that included people like Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli.
And it was enormously helpful in enabling people who sided with our struggle to say yes, I support the Freedom Charter. It’s a vision of a future South Africa, that’s the country I want. And in that sense, it catered for the most diverse sections of the population. Could be wealthy businesspeople from different communities, it could be very poor people, men, women, rural people, urban people. Yes, the Freedom Charter became central. And it was amazing in the decades that passed how well it stood up. There are lots of documents that are adopted and within five, ten, twenty years, they’re out of date. And usually because they’ve been adopted by lawyers, political scientists, political leaders responding to particular demands of the moment. The Freedom Charter withstood that and I’m sure it withstood the passage of time because it had that enormous public input.
The people must be involved in the project of expressing their demands. It was to get the demands right, but also to give – today we use the word ownership – of the project to the masses. And an enormous amount of energy went into getting the message out and getting the messages back in. I would see some of the messages. A paper bag, you know, was opened up and big handwriting… something about the pass laws, or land, or education.
I was reading recently that some people from the Liberal Party were invited to join in by the ANC and they said, ‘No, no, no, this idea of getting illiterate people to determine the Charter, that’s not right. One needs intellectuals and people with proper schooling and so on to decide on a document that important.’ At the time that might have sounded very reasonable, but there were two different philosophies involved and ours was the philosophy of a mass movement. We spoke about the masses, we believed in the masses, we believed in the ordinary people having the same rights and entitlements as the well-off people, the leaders. And it worked. It wasn’t just a good idea. It worked out very, very well in practice. So, our vision represented by the Freedom Charter is something for the masses. Ordinary people matter, ordinary people help in the drafting of the document. They adopt it by acclamation. It’s for their rights in a future, free, democratic South Africa.
