Third World Quarterly
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The Freedom Charter: the contested South African land issue Sibonginkosi Mazibuko To cite this article: Sibonginkosi Mazibuko (2017) The Freedom Charter: the contested South African land issue, Third World Quarterly, 38:2, 436-449, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2016.1142368 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1142368
Published online: 02 Mar 2016.
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Third World Quarterly, 2017 VOL. 38, NO. 2, 436–449 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1142368
The Freedom Charter: the contested South African land issue Sibonginkosi Mazibuko Department of Development Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
ARTICLE HISTORY
ABSTRACT
The Freedom Charter represents a desire to create a society that is based on common citizenship and democracy in a society divided in all aspects of its life. This paper problematises and interrogates the Charter’s theoretical and philosophical claim on land. It uses the methodology of Afrocentricity and Africana critical theory to dispute the theoretical and philosophical basis of the Freedom Charter. The paper argues that the understanding, desire and vision of the Freedom Charter are irreconcilable. It concludes that the Charter reconciles the dispossessed with their dispossession, reflecting coloniality and white domination in South Africa.
Received 23 October 2015 Accepted 12 January 2016 KEYWORDS
Colonialism land dispossession contradictions Freedom Charter South Africa
Introduction Africans are Natives of Africa; they and Africa are one; their relation to Africa is superior to the relations of other sections of the population…Hence it is evidently wrong to place Africans on a footing of equality with other racial groups at present residing in Africa. Africans are fighting for Africa; but other sections are fighting only for their rights to trade and extract as much wealth as possible from Africa.1
In many instances how we understand history depends on the one that presents the facts. While the loose argument is that facts speak for themselves, logic indicates that it is the interpretation of facts that matters. That an event occurred cannot be disputed, but why and how it happened is bound to result in different views, depending again on the number and ideological positions of the thinking parties involved. This argument fits well with the understanding of the Freedom Charter (the Charter) in South Africa. The Charter first appeared in the public domain when a number of organisations met at Kliptown, south of Johannesburg, in June 1955. Over that period it has hardly been subjected to any scrutiny over the claims it makes on the land question in particular. In South Africa the land question has for a long time been a contested terrain between the indigenous African people and the European settlers. On the one hand, the indigenous people claim that they have always lived in the southernmost part of the continent of Africa and know no other origins of themselves; on the other hand, the settlers claim that everybody is a settler in South Africa because the bantu-speaking Africans came from CONTACT Sibonginkosi Mazibuko
Mazibsg@unisa.ac.za
© 2016 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
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somewhere north (sometimes east) of Africa, with the exception of the Khoi-San people who have always occupied the southern part of the continent. The land question therefore continues to bedevil the South African political landscape. However, certain key questions are rarely asked. One such question relates to the Freedom Charter. The Charter is a compilation of the demands for civil liberties that black people were denied by the settler-colonial administrations. It lists these demands without differentiating between the colonised indigenous people and the settler community. The demands reflect a class-conscious condition where the African people in particular plead for accommodation in a situation that rejects them. The Charter makes no reference to the fundamental issues of colonialism and land dispossession, which were major issues not only in South Africa but continentally at the time. This paper interrogates the Charter’s claim on land. At a time when the colonised world was seeking to free itself from the chains of colonialism, and Africans throughout the continent were demanding Africa for the Africans, the Charter claimed South Africa for all who lived in it. To the extent that this paper problematises the philosophical underpinnings of the Charter, it uses the methodology of Afrocentricity to dispute the theoretical basis of the Charter. The paper argues that the understanding, desire and the vision of the Charter were, as they are today, colonial and irreconcilable. To that effect, and in pursuit of both colonial and narrow class interests, the Charter justified land dispossession and unsustainable living conditions for the dispossessed majority. The tendency to regard South Africa as a White domain and distinct from the rest of the continent is also evident in the refusal and/or reluctance to rename the country Azania in the footsteps of many of the countries that tried distinctively to shed the vestiges of colonialism and settler-colonialism in the continent. Examples of countries that did shed the colonial badge are Ghana (Gold Coast), Tanzania (Tanganyika), Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Namibia (South West Africa), Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), to mention a few. In South Africa settler-colonialism is also referred to as ‘colonialism of a special type’. This is largely because the conservative liberals who serve as ‘think-tanks’ for the country would like to erase from the minds of the dispossessed the memories of the brutality of colonialism and its consequences, in spite of the evident poverty and inequality biased against the colonised in the country. This ‘colonialism of a special type’ is just another way African people are patronised and effectively told to accept their fate. The paper then concludes that, by misrepresenting the critically fundamental land question, the Charter attempts to reconcile the dispossessed with their condition of dispossession and thus reflected coloniality and white domination long before colonialism and settler-colonialism came to an end in South Africa.
Afrocentricity, Africana critical theory and the Freedom Charter Asante argues that the concept of Afrocentricity embraces the socioeconomic–political aspirations of the Africana phenomena.2 In this regard it can only articulate the experiences of those dominated by a Western ethos. According to Pellerin,3 Afrocentricity is better suited to researching Africana phenomena because it allows African experiences, histories and cultures to guide and inform all research, and thus enables the production of fruitful and liberating knowledge. This methodology allows the researcher to understand the embedded assumptions as they relate to race and culture, for example. In this regard even the reliability of the research will be found in the everyday lives of African people, as opposed
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to what Ivor Chipkin refers to ‘as an African identity created by the colonial experiences and which never existed before’.4 Similarly Rabaka explains that Africana critical theory provides an explanation to ‘how colonialism or, rather racial colonialism altered what it means to be, or who counts as human’.5 Africana critical theory is better suited to dissecting the Charter because, according to Rabaka, it refocuses, historicises, politicises and materialises the Africana phenomena. These statements are profound, given the current yet historical conditions of indigenous people in South Africa, to which Sitas poses the questions: ‘Has the last formal racial autocracy in the world been buried? Is the new creature a society at all? Has formal citizenship meant anything to the poor black majority? And what of the plethora of social problems that persist: poverty, marginalisation, violence and abuse, battery and crime, corruption and intolerance?’6 Refusing to recognise Africans as a people, the Charter refers to ‘national groups’. In this way it presents a situation where being of whatever tribe negates being African and therefore owner of the land. To the contrary, being an African tribe, a concept Mafeje refers to as ‘European colonial figmentation of African reality’,7 does not in any way mean that the various tribes are not African. At the same time the Charter speaks of these groups as equals, making the African claim on land less distinct from that of settlers. The Charter tries to hide the power relations that still exist between the indigenous people and the European settlers. The Charter attempts to erase colonialism by encouraging ‘national groups’ and it thereby entrenches coloniality. Coloniality and whiteness in South Africa are very noticeable through the continued conditions of inequality and economic injustice, as already pointed out by Sita and through the persistent branding of African people along tribal lines, also contested by Mafeje. In this regard, Mazibuko argues that the emphasis on and constant reference to ‘black and white’ and reference to basic civil liberties ensures the survival of the principle of multiracialism instead of a non-racial society.8 According to Muendane,9 the very use of the label ‘white’ reflects such individuals’ desire for an identity different from that of the indigenous people. Hence my argument that the Charter ensures the survival of coloniality and whiteness by ensuring that Africans contest settler-colonialism on the terms determined by the settler-colonialists themselves. The Charter seeks to give the settlers ‘power without responsibility while subjecting African people to exploitation with no redress’.10 Similarly, Thwala explains this contradiction with reference to the South African land reform policy that struggles to meet the needs of the country’s dispossessed inhabitants.11 While farming and residential needs are important, land cannot be limited to just these two concepts. Land should and must be understood in terms of its total value as understood by Africans themselves – economic, political, spiritual and cultural. For the African people, land is beyond a mere means of production. It is a totality of life. To this end, while the concept of land includes the primary economic activities (agriculture, mining, forestry, and fishing), it encompasses also the cultural and religious life of the people.12 Land, therefore, relates to the whole concept of being. The question of land ownership cannot be at the mercy of those who acquired it through colonisation. At the same time Magubane relates settler-colonialism to globalisation and how this has imposed restrictions on South African development.13 Indeed, settler-colonialism is just the continuous process of globalisation which started centuries ago, probably with the 1493 Papal Award to Portugal and Spain with respect to India, Africa and the Americas, respectively in the Treaty of Tordesillas.14
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The final coming of the democratic dispensation was also crafted along similar lines of conspiracy between the local comprador classes, representatives of the settler-community and foreign capital as the principles of the Charter were also brought into the Constitution.15 The Constitution declares that the land belongs to all who live in it but at the same time it refers to the protection of property rights.16 The overwhelming majority of the dispossessed have no property to defend in South Africa. That Constitutional clause helps protect colonial possession by European descendants. It turned a political question into a legalistic issue. Otherwise we will struggle to explain the poverty and inequality biased against indigenous people both in rural areas and in the periphery of all towns and cities in South Africa. It is largely through a theoretical analysis using Africana critical theory that we are able to capture these issues, because it is only that theory that speaks to the day-to-day living conditions of the African people in particular. The Charter presents a conservative, racial, liberal view to propitiate the dispossessed. It represents the interests of the dispossessing foreign capitalist class. It sought to capture the African elite. The coming together with the major opponents of racial segregation at Kliptown was nothing more than throwing the net wide enough to catch the African middle class. Once this objective was achieved, the existence of all the other parties became irrelevant. They all found a home in the new African organisation that had fallen for the bait through its leadership. The conservative racial liberals had succeeded in infiltrating the only organisation that represented the aspirations of the African majority. In the words of Makholwa association with African people became fashionable, relevant and proved profitable in the longer term.17 Through liberalism the country’s majority indigenous people constitute the labour force, while foreign European descendants own and control the means of production. This is well-represented by the fact that less than 5% of businesses listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange are owned by indigenous people. To fully understand what this means for the many poor, property-less, marginalised, disease-prone and unemployed African people in South Africa today, it is important to understand their common enemy in settler-colonialism. While it appears amazingly progressive, the real goal of the Charter is not the liberation of the dispossessed. It perpetuates suffering. Because they are landless and therefore poor, indigenous people in South Africa have largely become research subjects in the social sciences. They are cases of humanitarianism and charity in big numbers. More than anyone, they understand better the pangs of going to bed on empty stomachs and living their lives in tin and cardboard shacks they call homes. And, in line with Africana critical theory, these are the lived experiences of many African people. On the other hand, the ‘Mathews Doctrine’ (named after the man who had the idea for it – see below), in the form of the Freedom Charter, struggles to find a place among the minds of the dispossessed.
The ‘empty-space’ theory To justify their claim on the land, the settler-community makes use of the ‘empty-space’ theory. In the mind of the settlers there is nothing called an African. In South Africa there are only tribes – Khoi, San, Sotho, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. Thus the settler-colonialist regime created Bantustans, which to this day the last apartheid president, de Klerk, still defends.18 Consequently, in colonial terms, when we speak of the San and the Khoi, we are not speaking of and about Africa. How the ‘empty-space theory’ and tribalism are used is clear in Burman, who writes in the following terms:
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I am only dealing in this book with White discoverers; for all I know the entire country may have been known to the indigenous Hottentots and Bushmen – but we have no record of their discoveries.19
Such is colonial arrogance – history is history because it is written down. If we follow Burman’s logic correctly, since the Africans in the southern tip of the continent of Africa could not write, they therefore have no history. The only history recognised is that beginning with European tribes who were lured by the presence of precious minerals all over the land to which Burman testifies that: we are fortunate that the story of Monomotapa was known to Van Riebeeck, for without the promise of gold the early exploration of Southern Africa would not have taken place.20
All that said, the problem in South Africa has always been that it is the settler descendants who write the country’s history. Being victors, it is their views that dominate. The twisting and falsification of events and history has been their primary occupation, as observed by Pheko.21 But it must also be understood that the hunter and the hunted have two different stories to tell. In this case Afrocentricity affords African intellectuals the space to tell their own stories in a voice that is unashamedly African. Afrocentricity also helps expose the contradictions represented by settler-colonialism. One such contradiction is evident in Burman’s statement above, where he admits that the land was occupied and therefore known to Africans. This quote refers to tribes that lived in South Africa a long time before the arrival of the European settlers. It shows the awareness of local people in how the Europeans in South Africa have falsified history in order to justify their occupation of the land and subjugate the 75% majority of the African people to brutal oppression and exploitation.22
European descendant historians in South Africa have consistently tried, so far unsuccessfully, to present a picture that portrays the country as having been unoccupied before colonialism. Marks points out that they use the ‘empty-space’ theory to justify their occupation of the land through armed dispossession, rule and power and privileges over the indigenous people.23 Marks argues that South Africa was already occupied as early as the Stone and Iron Ages, well into the third and fourth centuries AD. Corroborating Pheko, Marks shows that the first Portuguese to reach the southern tip of Africa in 1488 found a people with a clear civilisation already living all over the land. The first Dutch people to lay a colonial claim on the southern tip of Africa only arrived on 6 April 1652 under the leadership of the Dutchman called Jan Van Riebeeck. There is no evidence hitherto that conclusively tells us that the Africans – regardless of tribal orientation – in the southern tip of the continent of Africa are not the original occupiers of that land. Inskeep provides insightful accounts of early people in South Africa: The earliest people in southern Africa were gatherers and hunters, without writing … How long had they lived there? Where did they come from? Were they all of one kind? How did they occupy and used the land they lived in? ...we mostly have to reconstruct the past from scraps of evidence dug from the ground…stone, bone and shell.24
Inskeep refers to the geological ‘sites of Taung in the northern Cape, from Sterkfontein, Swartkrans and Kromdraai near Krugersdorp in the Transvaal (today that Transvaal is divided into Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Northwest provinces)’ which provide evidence of human origins in the south going back some 10,000 years. Inskeep concludes thus: For at the moment when the ancestral Sotho were achieving their greatest extension into the Orange Free State the Portuguese were fired to discover a sea-route to the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to India. So it was that the first Portuguese ships, under the command of
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Bartholomeu Dias, rounded the Cape in 1488…The Cape of Good Hope was the ideal halfway stopping-point for water, meat, and a little ‘scurvy grass’. In 1652 the Dutch formalised arrangements and established below Table Mountain a base in order to cultivate a garden whose produce would alleviate the suffering of their sailors. The European presence in Southern Africa had begun.25
Somerville also explains that the southern tip of Africa was already occupied between 25,000 and 27,000 years before the arrival of the first Portuguese. Somerville shows that ‘the earliest Portuguese contact with the people of Angola occurred in 1483 with the arrival at the mouth of the Congo of the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao’.26 By no stretch of imagination would anyone dream of a European in that part of the world to the extent of claiming that the land is for everyone who lived in it. Purcell & Purcell also show that Jan van Riebeeck found Africans at the Cape sustaining themselves through farming, hunting and fishing.27 However, the treatment that the new arrivals meted out to indigenous people became unbearable. Africans were never exposed to exploitative labour conditions as introduced at the Cape by the conquering settlers. African defeat meant that the local people would henceforth be slaves, to which many refused to give in, instead choosing to migrate out of their own land. As they began to settle, the colonialists found working in the fields – and any other hard work – unbearable. They turned to the African people whom they forcefully subjected to slavery and cheap labour. Cheap and slave labour were what sustained the European colonisers for centuries in South Africa. Even today the latter’s resistance to transformation is the result of their realisation that they will no longer be able to sustain their lifestyles, which depend largely on cheap African labour.28 While every African was a potential slave and/or cheap labourer, dispossessed married Africans became a preferred source of stable labour on the farms. There was no equality, as claimed in the Charter. Bunn quotes one colonial settler in the Natal colony saying: The man who comes with a wife to settle on a place, a respectable type if given a suitable base – something that is really comfortable, especially if it has a hard floor – finds that his good lady takes a fancy to the amenities as the beginnings of civilisation gradually increase and so the poor devil has to work his lifetime out to satisfy her demands, and you don’t have to drag the territories through with recruiters, as your man is tied by a force more potent than even the tax collectors in the Native areas.29
It is therefore in the genetic configuration of colonialism, informed by its anthropology, to twist and distort the facts in order to falsify history. Colonialism and settler-colonialism could only be sustained through lies, deceit and force.
The struggle against dispossession Before one falls into the colonial trap of trying to isolate South Africa from the rest of the continent, it is important to relate South Africa’s struggle using the method of Afrocentricity as part and parcel of the broad question of African colonisation by Europe. It was for this same reason that Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana declared that Ghana’s independence from British colonialism was meaningless if there was still any single part of the continent that was still under colonial rule. For this reason Nkrumah expended a lot of his country’s resources in support of African freedom and independence. However, I limit that history to those of the Frontline States of Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia. These countries share their international borders with South Africa and have very strong economic, political,
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spiritual and cultural relations with each other. Their colonial occupation cannot be separated from that of South Africa, also called Azania. The struggle of the African people did not begin with apartheid in 1948, or with the exclusion of African people from the country’s political life with the formation of the colonial Union of South Africa in 1910. The struggle began with the first European people to land on South African shores long before 6 April 1652. Pheko shows that the first confrontation between the indigenous African people and European people took place when a retired Portuguese officer Francisco de Almeida landed at the Cape on 1 March 1510.30 These Portuguese raided the cattle that belonged to Africans. Again, in 1647, a Dutch ship named Haarlem was destroyed by a storm at Table Bay. Among the survivors were sailors called Nicholaas Proot and Leender Janssen who were saved by Africans. The two survivors returned home and later came back with Jan van Riebeeck, instructed to occupy the Cape. That day represents the arrival of imperialism and colonialism in South Africa; soon conflicts over land erupted. Since they could not compete against the European guns, the African people were forced to migrate and finally settled and adapted to the semi-dry conditions further up the present Cape. It was a rational decision. They had chosen freedom in the jungle over serving European foreigners in tranquillity. The European people were not going to be interested in dry land that would not help produce the crops they needed or sustain their cattle which they had also taken from those ‘expelled’ Africans. But it must also be remembered that some of those Africans left the Cape not because of the conflict. They left because they found themselves dying from new diseases that they did not know, such as smallpox. Many Khoi-San people lost their lives through this contagious disease which came with the sailors from Europe – a kind of genocide. African living conditions were severely disrupted. As a result of the antagonism among the newly arrived European tribes themselves, others chose to migrate into the interior. Still they found Africans occupying the land. Wars of resistance ensued as European people encroached into the land. The protagonists had unequal access to military equipment. The Africans relied on their skin shields and spears, while the European occupiers ruthlessly fired their guns. In many instances African people were forced into signing treaties and none of those treaties was written in a local language, a point which raises obvious concerns. Those treaties then provided foreign intruders with excuses to grab and annex the land. Wherever resistance occurred, it was broken by the barrel of the gun. The wars, suffering, humiliation and death of African people at the hands of European conquerors are testimony to the resistance that African people put up against colonialism in South Africa. They died in battlefields, armed only with the spear and the animal skin shield against the gunpowder of the Europeans. Lamenting after visiting the battlefield of Isandlwana, now turned into a tourist attraction, John Laband writes: I was taken hold by a visceral intimation…of the ancient, soaringly immense African landscape that embraced me, combined with a sense of marvel at the courage of those Zulu warriors – those sons of Africa – who had thrown down their lives to preserve their land and kin against would-be conquerors from across the seas.31
The final armed resistance of such nature was that by Bhambhatha in Greytown, KwaZuluNatal in 1904–06. Although it is often said that Bhambhatha was refusing to pay taxes, the essence of the matter rested on land from which African people were being uprooted to provide cheap labour for mines and farms in order to sustain the colonial economy in South
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Africa. The latest contemporary events of resistance that helped shape the future of South Africa are recorded by the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprisings of 1976. Without fail all these events relate to land dispossession and land occupation. These events have historical significance to the Africans who have always felt the pain of European presence in their country. To this day, everywhere an African is found in South Africa, his and her pain is over the loss of the ancestral land to the Europeans whose strength lay in arms. It is this defeat in war that turned every African and his/her descendants into the slaves and workers they are today, while the foreign victors became masters and bosses. This is the history the Freedom Charter will never be able to erase. These are the wounds the Charter can never heal. Besides the written records of what happened in the struggle for liberation and freedom in South Africa, a lot of understanding can be gained from analysing the struggle songs.32 There is more than enough evidence that songs are an important embodiment of a people’s origins, ways of life, cultural experience, etc. One particular song that has been sung over the years, and to this day, across all political tendencies among the dispossessed and oppressed relates to the land question: Thina sizwe esinsundu Sikhalela izwe lethu Elathathwa ngabamhlophe Sithi mabayek’ ukumhlaba wethu. (We the nation of black people We demand our land That was taken by white people We say hands-off our land.)
This song has been sung by generation after generation in the struggle. It could be that, when African leaders speak in public, they do so in a foreign (English) language other than the one they sing in and then unconsciously contradict themselves. It is only in the English language that one hears the misrepresentations in the Charter. In their own languages African people know the land is theirs and theirs alone. How possible is it that African people could be so kind that, while Europeans claim Europe for themselves, Africans could claim South Africa for everyone? However, the resistance against the machinations to instil a false history among younger generations continues in many other ways in South Africa, as shown by the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign. The Charter imposed an added burden on African people, namely to have always to appease the European settlers. Today this burden flies in the face of transformation as the settlers more often than not feel their sins of colonialism and settler-colonialism have been forgiven, if not forgotten. Herein, then, lies the Charter’s masquerading as freedom when it actually represents colonial ontological and epistemological interests. The Charter could be seen, then, as an instrument that is used by settler-colonialists to entrench and internalise the conditions of coloniality. It maliciously introduced the perpetuation of white supremacy in South Africa. It is a fact that colonialism and settler-colonialism were violent by nature. African people in South Africa have always known that their fate could only be determined by arms. So long as the colonialists were armed with the best and latest weapons, and until Africans also
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had access to similar arms, colonial aggression could not be addressed satisfactorily. Carter explains this phenomenon in very simple terms: Wherever the colonizers advanced, they were mainly interested in hearing themselves speak; the mirrors they handed over were a deception, beguiling the time until reinforcements landed.33
The tide actually turned when the African people decided to take up arms in the 1960s. Again, settler-colonial interests could only be saved by returning to the Charter. The oppressors then clearly realised that the Charter was in fact protecting their interests. The negotiations that resulted in the 1996 Constitution are the confirmation of this argument. However, merely stating in the Preamble of the Constitution that South Africa belongs to all who live in it was not enough for the colonialists to continue their domination. They demanded more assurances that their colonial loot would be protected in the new dispensation. Finally, they managed to persuade the negotiating parties at the Conference for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) to include the clause that ensured the protection of private property – the sunset clause – in the Constitution. The 1994 democratic general election in South Africa had to be approved by the white electorate in a referendum held on 17 March 1992. What would have been the situation had that electorate voted ‘no’ to the question: ‘Do you support continuation of the reform process which the State President began on February 2, 1990, and which is aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?’ The majority of the minority European population in South Africa approved the process. What this means is that South Africa’s destiny depended on the population of the country’s colonising minority. The dispossessed majority, which went into voting even without a voters’ roll, had no say. When de Klerk woke up the next day to announce: ‘Today we have closed the book on apartheid’, it was on terms laid down by the colonisers. The African majority had only been emancipated, not liberated, for ‘liberation is a historical and not a mental act’.34 To this day many African people in South Africa go hungry and they sleep in shacks. To what extent, then, can it be said that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, when the fact that European descendants have such a sway on issues begs the question of who the country belongs to. These accounts represent what Steve Biko called ‘a clique of foreigners deciding on the lives of a majority’.35 The 1994 elections brought about ‘peace’ in the country. A better life was promised for all. Many looked forward to prosperity. However, history has once again proven that there is a difference between reality and illusion. Poverty and inequality have worsened for Africans in particular.36 Many of the once-hopeful African middle-class are drowning in debts and have no alternative to the ever-rising cost of living. Government ministers have become, in many ways, fire-fighters, as they have to be running around quelling protests and sometimes violent demonstrations against ‘land invasions’, farm evictions, poor delivery of services and lack of jobs, among other things. In what may also be seen as following the lines of the Soweto 1976 student uprising, beginning in late 2014 South African students in institutions of higher education have spent hours outside classrooms protesting against the continued existence of colonial statues and the high costs of tuition in all university campuses across the country. In late October 2015 they stormed the national parliament in Cape Town, demanding the lowering of study fees. They call their protest movement the #Rhodes Must Fall’ after the British arch-imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes owned a mining empire in South Africa and beyond, and he was known for his blatant racist disrespect for and hatred of African people in particular.
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The student campaign is symbolic in its demand for an end to the conditions of poverty, inequality and suffering which are associated with colonialism.
Whence came the Freedom Charter? The origins of the Charter are as a matter of fact embedded in the history of liberation in South Africa. Its acceptance and, in some quarters, its rejection both testify to two ideological protagonists in the country. Admitting that he could only speak indefinitely of the preparations for the Congress of the People, Luthuli (who was a chief in one tribal area of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as the President of the ANC, but under house arrest at the time of the ‘adoption’ of the Charter) stated that the Charter was the idea of Professor ZK Mathews and that the ANC branches had had only very short notice to submit their views before the Kliptown gathering in 1955.37 Participant organisations to the Charter at Kliptown were the South African Indian Congress, the African National Congress (ANC), the Coloured People’s Organisation and the Congress of Democrats (later SACP after it was banned it 1950). Forming an alliance against apartheid, the Congress of the People met at Kliptown on 26 June to adopt the Charter as something that all the groups recognised as basic demands against apartheid. The Charter was henceforward to take precedence over the ANC’s 1943 African Claims in South Africa and the 1944 Programme of Action.38 A section of the ANC’s Youth League had detected and rejected the infiltration of liberals into the organisation as early the 1940s. Its then leader, Muziwakhe Lembede, spoke strongly against the tendency to equate African claims over land with those of foreign national groups in South Africa.39 Kuper explains that the historical and ideological contradiction over the Charter’s claim on land ownership finally led the Africanist section within the ANC to break away; it formed the current Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC).40 To this effect, those who stood opposed to the Charter maintained that it could never have been the work of a genuine African leadership. Looking at it that way, one is forced to rethink the conditions of 1955 in South Africa. At the helm of white of white supremacy in a colonial situation, when an African in particular was no more than a commodity, it is hard to imagine any Africans thinking they were equals with European descendants. On the basis of the evidence of the known history at the time, it is a contradictory claim for an African to believe the land belonged to all who lived in it. Pheko disputes whether the Charter was adopted at Kliptown and is corroborated by Grobler.41 These authors argue that the meeting at Kliptown turned chaotic. First there were the youths who were dissatisfied with the manner in which the Charter was ‘smuggled’ into the organisation. Second, Luthuli points out that the Charter was introduced at Kliptown without due deliberations at branches of the ANC, in particular. Third, the police disrupted the meeting by charging at the congregants, accusing them of holding an ‘illegal’ gathering. According to Luthuli, many obstacles made it difficult to have vigorous debates about the Charter; nonetheless, the ANC leadership ratified the Charter the following March. Mathews was of course an African intellectual whose ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations of conservative liberals. In my view, he represents what Asante describes as Africans ‘trapped in theoretical and methodological prisons from which they can only escape with great danger to their reputations’.42 Mphahlele, who left South Africa and went into exile in 1957, explains that it was the liberals who used to invite
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‘educated and intelligent and moderate natives’ into their private houses for parties.43 He points out that, ignoring the ‘history of pillage and plunder; fire and murder; dispossession and humiliation’, these liberals opposed violent resistance and instead advocated that the Africans work for reforms from within the confines of the law. Ironically casting more doubt on the integrity and sincerity of the Charter, Mphahlele writes: At age five it becomes pretty clear to you as a black person in South Africa which side of the color line you belong in. You know at 16 when you carry a pass what you’re up against. Out in the open labor market you get to feel the muscle of white power…He determines where you shall be born, where you shall earn your livelihood and where you shall marry, die and be buried…you become amazed that he can be so obtuse to think that as a white custodian of God’s kingdom he can even prepare you for some kingdom of after-life, where you won’t have a ghetto. At a later stage you realize he’s not obtuse. He is methodically working for his own security of tenure in the business of governing.44
Wittingly or unwittingly, Mathews and company fell into this trap. They probably bought into the idea of the Charter thinking that, given their intellectual capabilities, they were thinking straight. They sold the idea and campaigned for its acceptance among the dispossessed to some measure of success. But at some stage, some people realised that the Charter was a representation of others’ interests and aspirations, and diagonally opposed to those of the Africans.
Conclusion While the ‘empty-space’ theory represents the dominant Western view, Afrocentricity represents the African voice, where the Africana phenomenon is concerned, clearly articulating the dialectics of colonialism. In this regard African intellectuals need to choose between their ‘reputations’ and colonial machinations. The fundamental and primary argument of this article is that there are two things that become very clear when the land question is interrogated against the claim made in the Freedom Charter in South Africa: (1) there is no credible evidence to suggest that African people were not occupying the land when the first European settlers landed at the Cape 361 years ago; and (2) there is a complete lack of evidence to show that European settlers in South Africa are the owners of the land, with the exception of the wars in which the Africans were defeated. This article has shown, using both historical and archaeological evidence, that the land in the southernmost part of the continent of Africa historically belongs to the indigenous African people, regardless of their tribal orientation. These people have lived in that country over thousands of years. In fact, archaeological evidence shows that these people have lived there beyond European colonial imagination, thus collapsing the empty-space theory. The article is unambiguous in stating that the contradictions in the Freedom Charter prove that an African elite was used politically by foreign capital to misrepresent the interests and demands of the indigenous people. While it appears amazingly progressive, the real nature of the Charter differs little from so-called development aid. It appears as something that liberates, while in reality it is designed to keep people in colonial bondage. It patronises African people in very demeaning terms. The Charter continues to represent the fraudulent presentation of settler-colonial interests in South Africa. By being silent on the critically fundamental colonial and land dispossession question, it symbolises the dominance of European people over the indigenous
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dispossessed African people. It pacifies African people through the local comprador class into accepting landlessness. The Charter ensures the marginalisation of the interests and aspirations of African people in every respect. In these ways the Freedom Charter postulated coloniality before the end of colonialism and settler-colonialism, and whiteness before the end of apartheid. It tried, and still tries, to reconcile the dispossessed with their dispossession. It perpetuates a colonial narrative that is founded on the false theory of empty space and, as indicated by Rabaka, changes what it means to be African.
Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements My sincere thanks go to colleagues with whom I have constantly engaged over the Freedom Charter. Many of them considered themselves Charterists but they were willing to hear my case. The feedback from the WASET International Conference and the Archie Mafeje Research Institute (AMRI) seminar in Pretoria were very helpful in shaping my understanding of the Freedom Charter.
Notes on Contributor Sibonginkosi Mazibuko is senior lecturer in the Department of Development Studies at the University of South Africa, and editor of the in-house Africanus Journal of Development Studies which is published by the Unisa Press. He obtained his PhD from the University of the Free State. He previously worked as a researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), both in Pretoria. His research interests cover state–civil society–economy relations.
Notes 1. Edgar and ka Msuza, Anton Lembede. 2. Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. 3. Pellerin, “Benefits of Afrocentricity.” 4. Carr, “Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism, and the African World History Project,” 11. 5. Rabaka,Concepts of Cabralism. 6. Sitas, The Mandela Decade. 7. Mafeje, “The Ideology of Tribalism.” 8. Mazibuko, “The Marikana Massacre.” 9. Muendane, I am an African. 10. Kwame Nkrumah, quoted in Mazibuko, “The Meaning of African Freedom and Independence.” 11. Thwala, “Land and Agrarian Reform.” 12. The inseparability of land from the total life experiences of indigenous people has been told a number of times. See, for example, Kuhn and Wolpe, “Feminism and Materialism”; Masiphula et al., “Evolution of the Agrarian Structure”; Merchant, Earthscan; Van Zyl et al., “Natural Resource Management Issues”; Shiva, “Introduction”; and Martin and Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe. 13. Magubane, “Globalisation and the South African Transformation.” 14. Bown, “Trade in the Age of Discovery.” 15. Esterhuyse, Endgame. 16. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108. 17. Makholwa, Black Widow Society.
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18. “F. W. de Klerk sparks Outrage.” 19. Burman, Who really discovered South Africa? 20. Ibid, 8. 21. Pheko, Apartheid. 22. Magubane, “Class, Race and the Franchise Question.” 23. Marks, “The Myth of the Empty Land.” 24. Inskeep, The Peopling of South Africa, 9. 25. Inskeep, The Peopling of South Africa, 153. 26. Somerville, Angola. 27. Purcell and Purcell, Van Riebeeck Diary in Pictures. 28. Magubane, Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other. 29. Bunn, “Comparative Barbarism,” 48. 30. Pheko, Apartheid. 31. Laband, Zulu Warriors. 32. Letsoalo, “Restoration of Land.” 33. Carter, “Turning the Tables,” 32. 34. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 38. 35. Stubs, Steve Biko, 42. 36. Statistics South Africa, Census. 37. Luthuli, Let my People Go. 38. Motlhabi, The Theory and Practice of Black Resistance. 39. Edgar and ka Msuza, Anton Lembede. 40. Kuper, “African Nationalism in South Africa.” 41. Pheko, The Land is Ours; and Grobler, A Decisive Clash. 42. Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge, 38. 43. Mphahlele, The African Image. 44. Ibid., 26–29.
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