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IOL News
29-07-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
'The Short End of the Stick': A Bikoian Rejection of Freedom Charter Nostalgia
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. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading 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.
IOL News
26-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Freedom Charter at 70: tapestry of hope
Ladies from various community groups at Kliptown. Image: Supplied AS SOUTH Africa, this Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, adopted on June 26, 1955, in a defiant gathering in Kliptown, Soweto, it is timely to interrogate its legacy not with nostalgic reverence but with the sharp lens of critique. The Freedom Charter was born of a radical imagination. The activists gathered there dared to envision a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, prosperous, and egalitarian country. It remains the cornerstone of our nation's constitutional democracy and its rights-based ethos. Yet, this document, hailed as a beacon of liberation, casts a long shadow over a society fractured by enduring inequalities, where the widening gap between rich and poor mocks the charter's lofty promises. To reflect on this milestone is to confront the paradox of a nation that celebrates its democratic triumphs, while wrestling with the reality of unfulfilled aspirations. The Freedom Charter was no mere political manifesto. It was a subversive act of collective dreaming, woven from the aspirations of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Indian Congress (SAIC), Coloured People's Congress, and Congress of Democrats. South Africans of Indian descent, in whose veins ran a century of resistance against colonial indignities from indenture to segregation, were integral to this tapestry. Activists like Swaminathan Gounden, a worker from Durban's industrial heart of Jacobs, embodied the courage of the marginalised. At great peril, Gounden slipped through the apartheid state's surveillance to attend the Kliptown gathering, a journey fraught with the risk of arrest or worse. 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 His return to Faulks shoe factory was met with swift retribution - dismissal for daring to dream of a world where 'the people shall govern.' Such sacrifices were not isolated. Among the apartheid regime's repressive responses was the 1956 Treason Trial, preceded by lightning arrests that ensnared 156 activists, including Chief Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, and Indian African stalwarts like Monty Naicker, MP Naicker and Kay Moonsamy. The trial, intended to smother dissent, instead amplified the Charter's rousing call, exposing the moral bankruptcy of a system that equated the fight for social and economic justice with treason. Since 1994, South Africa has drawn on the Freedom Charter's lofty promises, enshrining its principles in the 1996 Constitution - a document lauded for its progressive ideals such as an independent judiciary, a vibrant civil society, freedom of faith, and the dismantling of racial hierarchies. Indian Africans, once relegated to the margins in the obscene racial pecking order, have carved spaces in the nation's political and economic fabric. Census data points to the fact that people of Indian origin have been net economic beneficiaries of the democratic state on a scale second only to those of European descent. Yet, this narrative of progress is haunted by a brutal truth - South Africa is among the world's most unequal societies, its Gini coefficient a statistical indictment of a dream deferred. Delegates from Natal at Kliptown for the signing of the Freedom Charter. Image: Supplied The opulence of Zimbali's villas stands in sharp contrast with the squalor of Cato Crest's shacks. Unemployment, officially upwards of 32%, ravages black youth especially, while land reform and wealth redistribution, which were central demands of the Freedom Charter, are caught in bureaucratic red tape and elite capture. The ANC, once the standard-bearer of liberation, is being suffocated by corruption. Its moral authority has been eroded by governance failures that have left the 'born-free' generation grappling in large part with economic despair. Should today's youth honour the sacrifices of Goonam, Gounden, Luthuli, and that golden generation? Young peoples' discontent has been channelled into movements like #FeesMustFall, which echo the Freedom Charter's demand for accessible education. Yet, others, burdened by the immediacy of survival, dismiss the Freedom Charter as a relic, its promises hollowed out by a post-apartheid state that has traded revolutionary zeal for compromises with traditional and new elites. Struggle veterans, Judge Thumba Pillay, from left, Kay Moonsamy, and Swaminathan Gounden at the Passive Resistance Monument marking the occasion of the 60 anniversary of the Freedom Charter. Image: Kiru Naidoo Social media is a vocal outlet for their disillusionment, with hashtags demonising political and economic grandees. This generational rupture threatens to sever the connective tissue between the struggle's heroes and a youth population that feels betrayed by the very democracy they inherit. The state has failed to translate constitutional rights into tangible material benefits. There has instead been an inordinate focus on the burgeoning (and unsustainable) social welfare system as a breathing valve to hold the poor at bay. Judge Albie Sachs with delegates from the South African Indian Congress SAIC at Kliptown. Image: 1860 Heritage Centre To read the Freedom Charter in 2025 is to ponder a text that is both prophetic and accusatory. It prophesied a South Africa free from apartheid's straitjacket, a vision partially realised in the nation's democratic stability. In a world convulsed by war from Ukraine's battlefields to Gaza's ruins to the Congo and Sudan, South Africa's upholding of the rule of law and constitutionalism is no small feat. Yet, the Freedom Charter also chastises with its words, translating into a mirror reflecting the nation's failure to bridge the gulf between rich and poor. The struggles and sacrifices of those who fought for freedom compel us to ask - what does it mean to honour a struggle when its fruits are so unevenly distributed? Hope lies not in blind optimism but in the radical act of reimagining the Freedom Charter's possibilities. South Africa's people must reclaim the courage of Kliptown - its defiance, its unity, and its insistence on justice to forge a future where the people truly govern. Selvan Naidoo Image: File Kiru Naidoo Image: File Selvan Naidoo and Kiru Naidoo are co-authors with Paul David and Ranjith Choonilall of The Indian Africans, published by Micromega and available at * The Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal will host a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter with the launch of veteran activist Saro Naicker's biography, Love for Learning, at 6pm today (June 26) on the Westville campus. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. THE POST
