Congress Call
This post is about the preparations, from 1953 onwards for
the 1955 Congress of the People (CoP); the Congress of the People as a definite
event; and the Freedom Charter that came out of that event, all considered as
historic acts and as part of the process of building the South African National
Democratic Revolution (NDR).
What could very advantageously be used for this discussion
is an electronic copy of the book by Jeremy Cronin and Raymond Suttner,
published in 1986, called “30 Years of the Freedom Charter”, or even just a
good extract from the book. But unfortunately the book is not available on the
Internet. Instead, it has been polished up and re-published as “50 Years of the
Freedom Charter”, in hard copy only. If you can get either one of these
editions, do use it to prepare for this discussion.
“The Congress of the People and Freedom Charter Campaign”,
by Ismail Vadi, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1995, is another book that
comes up in searches of the Internet.
According to the small samples of Vadi’s book that can be
read on line, (i.e. the Introduction,
the Preface, and
the Foreword by
Walter Sisulu) the planning of the CoP began in 1953, and the campaign was only
wound down in 1956, the year of the beginning of the Treason Trial, which was a
consequence of the CoP. The Treason Trial continued until 1961, by which time
all the defendants had been acquitted.
Another document on the Internet is a short History of the Freedom Charter
on the “non-partisan”
South African History Online web site, funded by the Ford Foundation, the
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and other liberal philanthropists.
“Non-partisan” in the case of SAHO therefore tends to mean that the Communist
Party is mentioned as little as possible. Nevertheless, these pages bear
out the extended nature of the political intervention that was the total CoP
Campaign, a campaign that was a clear extension of the National Democratic
Revolution policy of the recently-banned CPSA and of the Comintern before it,
since 1920.
The CoP/Freedom Charter campaign was a determined and
deliberately visible construction of a national democratic project. It involved
huge masses of people. It was a conscious and fully worked-out design, even to
the Nehru-style caps in ANC colours that the Volunteers wore. [See the photo
above showing the platform at Kliptown, with a Volunteer in attendance]
There is an error in the SAHO text: There were five
organisations involved, not four. SACTU, the non-racial South African Congress
of Trade Unions, was a late entry to the CoP but it made the cut and it managed
to feature in the “wheel of unity” that nowadays still forms part of both
COSATU’s and the ANC’s logos.
The second image shows the document that was used to
publicise the Freedom Charter after the Congress, including the newly-pasted
“SACTU” acronym, and the “ANC” acronym shifted from the rim to the hub of the
wheel. The document includes quotes from the Freedom Charter itself.
This series is about the NDR. This post and the reading are
given so as to invite you to consider the whole episode of the CoP campaign
from 1953 to 1956, and the subsequent struggle around the Treason Trial, as one
of the strongest specific and historical contributions to the NDR.
The document linked below includes the “Call to the Congress
of the People”. It was a mobilising flyer and it shows very clearly the large
scope and scale of the call to “all Unionwide Organisations”.
The Freedom Charter was much more than a list of demands. It
was an integral part of a kind of conscious nation-building which had real
revolutionary content and which demonstrated real democracy in action.
Those old comrades laid down an irresistible pattern. It
appealed to the heart as well as to the eye and to the mind, and it still
surrounds us today, manifested in the continuing Congress Alliance of which the
SACP, legal once more, is now an open part. There was never a time when the
communists were not part of the National Democratic Revolution. It is ours, as
much as it is anybody else’s. It is family.
As it was when Lenin spoke to the Second
Congress of the Communist International in 1920, so it was in 1955. Two
things were required. One was a genuine class alliance and unity-in-action
against the main oppressor class, the colonialist monopoly capitalists. The
other was the deliberate extension of democracy for the creation of a
democratic nation. The CoP campaign was exactly in this mould.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Call to the
Congress of the People; Freedom Charter.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment