OPINION: The Freedom Charter process was an imperfect but impressive attempt at capturing the will of the people and articulating an alternative vision to apartheid South Africa, writes Benjamin Roberts.
The Congress of the People campaign process was mapped out at a meeting of the alliance in March 1954. This entailed the establishment of provincial committees, followed by committees at workplaces, villages and black urban residential areas, known as At the heart of the process was the recruitment of a vast corps of “freedom volunteers” to inspire awareness of the Congress and to collect demands for incorporation into the charter.
flooding in to COP headquarters, on sheets torn from school exercise books, on little dog-eared scraps of paper, on slips torn The demands were written in multiple languages, and varied in style from pithy one-liners to wordier contributions, including the odd essay. Sadly, only a small set of the individual demands have been preserved in archives.
In April 1955, while final logistics for the Kliptown event were under way, the subcommittees of the National Action Committee sorted the multiplicity of demands thematically. A small drafting committee eventually used these materials to prepare the charter. This document text was hurriedly prepared, primarily by Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein of the South African Congress of Democrats, with the ANC leadership seeing it only on the eve of the Congress of the People. Around 3,000 delegates assembled at the
, approving each clause in the charter with a show of hands. The charter was adopted before the apartheid police halted the proceedings.. This has touched on organisational and ideological foundations, interpretive differences on content, as well as the degree to which the public demands are reflected in the final drafting process.
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