Imposing Charterist Political Hegemony

The Freedom Charter and 50 Years of Education Struggles 

With the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, Nina Benjamin and Bernadette Johnson show how the Charter has often been used to impose ANC politics on educational struggles.

The 26th of June 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter. At the beginning of May this year the Department

of Education launched it’s “Freedom Charter Campaign” – “Opening the doors of learning and culture through a quality education for all”, to celebrate 50 years of the charter.

The campaign is meant to focus on the ANC government’s achievements over the past 11 years. The minister argues that even though government has not yet delivered free and compulsory education it has made great strides in transforming the education system, guided by the Freedom Charter. And it is here that the myth unravels. Anyone participating or observing will recognise this as a cynical response to the crisis in education. Instead of an improved education system, the ANC government has reshaped the education system to serve the interests of a few. We now have a system in which learners have to pay user fees, suffer the consequence of fewer educators and learn under appalling conditions.

Instead of the Department of Education critically reviewing its pathetic delivery in education, the Freedom Charter is used to assert the ANC’s political legitimacy. It is not the first time that the Charter has been used by the ANC for this purpose. The ANC continually reinvents the history of the apartheid education struggles to suit its political needs.

The Congress of the People in 1955 that adopted the clause in the Freedom Charter that the ‘doors of learning and culture shall be open to all’ is hailed as a democratic, mass-based event culminating in the synthesis of popular demands. Unfortunately the initial intentions to evoke popular participation were not successful and the Charter is not an accurate reflection of the education struggles of the time.

The Charter process was planned as three phases: (i) recruitment of ‘Freedom Volunteers’ to popularise the Congress and collect demands for the charter; (ii) establishment of committees in workplaces, townships and villages by provincial committees; and (iii) convening of delegates from all committees to formulate the Charter. This did not happen. Instead of popular participation a small committee wrote the Freedom Charter.

Historians such as Jonathan Hyslop have recorded that education struggles, at that time, were not coordinated by any organisation, including the ANC. The process of drafting the Freedom Charter did not play a significant role in building education struggles and organisations of the time. The struggles emerged from below within localised communities from the degradation of dignity and the emotional and psychological stresses of apartheid. There were a number of strikes and demonstrations such as the Lovedale strike of 1946 and protests at Bethesda Bantu Training College. In

1949 Fort Hare students supported nurses at Victoria Hospital in their sit-down. Opposition took the form of ‘physical damage of school property, arson, class boycotts and sometimes attacks on teachers’.

Other struggles on the eve of the adoption of the Freedom Charter include a parents’ school boycott against the Bantu Education Act of 1953. The boycott began on the East Rand and spread to the Eastern Cape.

During the 1960s educational struggles continued at colleges and schools, escalating by 1968 and later, 1976. Struggles took place at missionary schools throughout the Eastern Cape and Natal. They were an expression of students’ frustrations with food rationing, discipline issues and grievances such as broken beds.

By late 1968, resistance took on renewed proportions as black students founded the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), an explicitly black student movement, inspired by Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (BC). In 1972 the South African Students’ Movement (SASM) was established. These organisations were engaged in anti-apartheid education boycotts and were central to the Soweto uprisings of 1976.

The 1976 uprising remains the most politically significant educational struggle, which spread in magnitude, scale and altered the field of political engagement fundamentally. It is not the ANC but the Black Consciousness movement that gave organisational expression to the uprisings of 1976. Political leadership of 1976 has been usurped by the ANC to create the impression of political hegemony going back to the Freedom Charter.

SASO was banned in 1977, leaving a political vacuum in education struggles. In 1981, through the launch of the Azanian Student Organisation (AZASO), this political vacuum was filled. It brought together the student representative councils (SRCs) on the black campuses. There was a strong alliance between AZASO and the Azanian

Peoples Organisation (AZAPO), which represented

Black Consciousness.

With the launch of the UDF in 1983 the ANC imposed the Charter as a criterion for affiliation to the UDF. In the Western Cape a bitter fight ensued between organisations belonging to the DBAC (Disorderly Bill Action Committee), a coalition formed to fight the Koornoff Bills. At the heart of the fight were Charterists asserting their hegemony over flourishing student and community struggles. This fight spilled into AZASO with the Charterists gaining the upper hand and forming SANSCO to exclude any other political tendency. SANSCO in its own words boasted its “complete adherence to the Freedom Charter and the congress movement led by the ANC”. With scant regard for student unity the Charter was used as a divisive tool to assert the ANC’s political hegemony.

SASCO is born out of the same divisive traditions as SANSCO. SANSCO and the white National

Union of South African Students (NUSAS) merged in 1991 to form SASCO, a non-racial, ANC-aligned student organisation. SASCO regarded its role as imposing political hegemony on the student movement through dominating all SRCs nationally. At the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) fights broke out during the 1990s within the student movement over SASCO’s continued imposition of charterist politics on students. As a consequence, the

Committee of Democracy (CODEMO), an alternative voice open to students from any political persuasion was formed at UWC. SASCO’s political intolerance at UWC resulted in the expulsion of CODEMO supporters who then formed the Student League.

Even though SASCO’s support on campuses has dwindled, the organisation has not committed itself to a critical review of its role in the decline of the student movement. A Charter should be a guide to political action, building unity and organisation. Contrary to the Department of Education’s attempt to portray an untarnished image of the ANC since the launch of the Freedom Charter the divisive politics of Charterists is a history that must be told.

 

Nina Benjamin works at Khanya College. Bernadette Johnson lectures in Education at Wits University. Both are active in the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) education sub-committee.