SACP on 50th Anniversary of Freedom Charter

Thursday, 23 June 2005 SACP statement on the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter The South African Communist Party (SACP) joins its allies and millions of South Africans in saluting the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter. The 1955 Congress of the People at Kliptown and the Charter it endorsed marked a major turning point in the history of our liberation struggle. In the early 1950s, through the Defiance Campaign in particular, the ANC and the Congress movement it led emerged, for the first time, as a truly mass movement. While the Defiance Campaign led millions of people in opposition to unjust laws, the Congress of the People Campaign moved from opposition to a clear statement and vision of what positively the democratic movement in our country stood for. Ever since, the Charter has guided generations of activists and democrats in the struggle for a more just society. But the Freedom Charter should not be honoured only as an inspiring visionary text. Equally significant was the manner in which the Freedom Charter demands emerged. The Charter was the product of many months of grass-roots campaigning in townships, rural villages, squatter camps and factory canteens. It emerged organically out of the struggle and aspirations of our people. Volunteers fanned out across our country and asked ordinary South Africans a simple but profound question: “If you were the government, what would you do?” In the 2005, going forward into our second decade of freedom, we need to continuously deepen and enrich the popular participatory traditions from which the Charter emerged. “The people”, its says, “shall govern”. For those cynics, like certain white-minority dominated parties, who still today sniff at the Freedom Charter, let us remind them of just how enlightened and generous the Charter is. Its opening statement declares that: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”. It is a remarkable and inspiring fact that after 300 years of brutal colonial occupation, genocide and dispossession, in the midst of a hardening apartheid regime, a representative gathering of South Africans, the majority of them black, could in 1955 have held up this non-racial vision. It is a vision the SACP continues to cherish. But the inclusiveness of the Charter is not limited to race, culture and creed. The Charter also upholds a vision of social and economic inclusiveness. The wealth and resources of our country, it says, belong to all South Africans. Living, as we do, in one of the most unequal societies in the world, the Charter’s vision of a shared economy, of common-wealth, remains a deeply pertinent aspiration. Kaizer Mohau Media Liaison Officer South African Communist Party (SACP) Tel: 011 339 3621/2 Fax: 011 339 4244/6880 Cell: 082 805 1085 Email: Kaizer@sacp.org.za Website: www.sacp.org.za