'The Short End of the Stick': A Bikoian Rejection of Freedom Charter Nostalgia

IOL News

3 days ago

The Congress of the People was organised by the National Action Council, a multi-racial organisation that later became known as the Congress Alliance. It was held in Kliptown on June 26, 1955, to lay out the vision of the South African people. Swaminathan Gounden was one of the Natal delegates who attended the Congress under the leadership of Archie Gumede.
Image: Swaminathan Gounden Collection
There is a dangerous return to nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa. The Freedom Charter, long treated as a sacred relic of liberation, is again being celebrated by figures like Ronnie Kasrils, who now serve as gatekeepers of Struggle memory. This reverence is not a harmless sentiment. It masks the failures of elite transition and conceals the betrayals of the democratic settlement. The Freedom Charter did not chart a path to Black liberation. It opened the door for a managed transfer of power that preserved the material base of colonial capital while installing a comprador elite to manage the contradictions.
Steve Biko warned against precisely this ideological trap. No matter what modifications are made to the status quo, the Black man will always have the short end of the stick. What must be called for is not reform, but a true reallocation of land and wealth. In Biko's framing, political freedom without material redistribution is meaningless. There is no justice where the land remains stolen and the economy remains in settler hands. Voting rights cannot substitute for sovereignty.
The Freedom Charter's ambiguity on the land question was deliberate. Its proclamation that 'the land shall be shared among those who work it' collapses the historical reality of conquest into a neutral discourse of labour and cooperation. Nowhere does it acknowledge the settler. Nowhere does it confront the theft. It fails to call for the return of land to the African majority. Instead of articulating a programme for decolonial redress, it adopts a conciliatory tone that prioritises harmony over justice. In effect, what is framed as a liberation mandate operates as a grammar of pacification, designed to absorb resistance rather than advance revolution.
That ambiguity carried through to the 1996 Constitution. Patrick Bond, in Elite Transition, makes the point that the constitutional settlement was a product of a class compromise. It was designed to pacify international investors, preserve white capital and neutralise the revolutionary impulse. The negotiated settlement did not emerge from the will of the masses but from a triangulation between the African National Congress leadership, global capital and white economic power. The result was a Constitution that promises equality but enshrines ownership. As Bond argues, the Constitution operates as 'a myth-making meme,' built to deradicalise struggle by offering symbolic rights in place of structural change.
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This is why land reform remains stalled. Section 25, the so-called property clause, protects private ownership even when that ownership is the direct result of theft and conquest. It couches restitution in the language of reasonableness and affordability, deferring justice to bureaucratic paralysis. This legal framework reflects the ideological DNA of the Freedom Charter, a text that never sought to overthrow the economic system but to moralise it.
Biko understood the danger of this kind of liberal substitution. Freedom without land and without independent means of livelihood is meaningless. For Biko, Black liberation was not about removing apartheid's legal codes. It was about removing the very conditions that made white power possible. 'It is not enough to remove the white man from power. We must remove the conditions that made his power possible.' That project remains unfulfilled.
Black consciousness leader Steve Biko's philosophy and ideology has stood the test of time.
Image: Independent Media Archives
The contemporary consequences are blatant. The mining belt still delivers billions in profit to multinational corporations while leaking acid into rivers and lungs. Rural communities are poisoned and abandoned. Urban centres swell with unemployed Black youth, structurally excluded from ownership in a society that defines success through capital accumulation. The banks, insurance houses, farms and media corporations remain in the hands of a racial oligarchy. Even the new sectors such as renewable energy, climate funding and global NGOism have been captured by former struggle stalwarts and their descendants who now form a class of managerial elites enriching themselves through donor money, Foundations and PR projects while the majority go hungry.
None of this can be explained without naming the ideological function of the Freedom Charter. It is not a neutral historical artefact. It is the founding myth of a liberal transition that demanded compromise from the dispossessed and reconciliation with the profiteers of genocide. It is the script from which the Constitution was adapted and it continues to function as the moral cover for structural betrayal.
For the younger generation, landless, jobless and criminalised, being told to look to Kliptown is a form of political insult. The Charter never spoke to their reality. It is a document that offered peace to power and slogans to the oppressed. It evaded the core contradiction of settler colonialism. There is no coexistence until land is returned, power is redistributed and the entire economic foundation of white supremacy is dismantled.
This is why Black Consciousness remains relevant. Steve Biko never asked the settler to share. He never asked for a seat at the table. He rejected liberalism, both white and black. He believed that Black people must define their own future, control their own institutions and return to the land that was stolen. Blacks must no longer be content to be on the receiving end but must be the architects of their own destiny.
This simply cannot be reconciled with the logic of the Charter. The Charter imagines a common future built on a shared investment in the nation. Biko called for sovereignty. The Charter offered inclusion into colonial modernity. Biko called for its destruction. The Charter deferred revolution in favour of negotiation. Biko rejected negotiation with thieves. There is no middle ground between these two positions.
The Freedom Charter was not sacred in 1955 and it is not sacred now. Its myth has been used to sedate political thought, justify class betrayal and deliver the masses into the hands of consultants, capital and false prophets. Ronnie Kasrils reinvoking it as a sacred text is emblematic of the liberalism that Biko warned about.
That formations such as the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) celebrate the Freedom Charter in the current conjuncture signals the extent to which emancipatory politics in South Africa have been diluted and depoliticised. What was once a militant voice of class struggle has become entangled in the sentimental recitation of a document that failed to name the enemy.
The echo chamber of Charterist nostalgia - amplified by a hybrid class of empty political commentators who mimic Kasrils and perform struggle rhetoric devoid of class analysis or historical accountability, reflects the ideological decay of a post-apartheid order collapsing under its own contradictions. In this postmodern liberal wasteland, recycled slogans masquerade as politics, and no pathway toward genuine liberation is offered.
We rose against the system in 1976 and we must do it again. By any means necessary we must rise, expose, dismantle and overthrow the system that has kept us in a permanent prison in our own land.
There will be no redemption without land. There will be no healing without the destruction of settler systems. There will be no justice where the economic base remains unchanged. And there will be no dignity for the African majority until the struggle is re-centred on material return.
We were not dispossessed through metaphor. We will not be liberated through myth.
The Charter must fall. The Constitution must be rewritten. The land must be returned.
Until that happens, the real betrayal will not be those who critique the Freedom Charter, but those who continue to protect it.
* Sipho Singiswa is a political analyst, filmmaker and Native rights activist. A 1976 student leader and former Robben Island prisoner, he has rejected the post-apartheid elite project and continues to organise around land and economic justice and the liberation of the African majority.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.