Decolonization and the Struggle for Justice: 70 Years of Freedom Charter
By Ronnie Kasrils
The Freedom Charter of South Africa was born of struggle. It must now be defended and renewed through struggle.
The Freedom Charter was adopted in Kliptown on June 26, 1955, seventy years ago. Thousands of delegates had traveled from across South Africa—by train, by bus, on foot—to take part in the Congress of the People. They met under an open sky, gathered on the dusty field where a wooden stage had been erected.
Armed police ringed the perimeter, their presence a reminder of the risks. But inside the fence, the atmosphere was determined and jubilant. One by one, the clauses of the Charter—on land, work, education, housing, democracy, peace—were read aloud, and each was met with unanimous approval.
The Charter was the distilled expression of months of discussion and collective vision. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most transformative statements in our history.
Discussions of the Freedom Charter seldom place it in its full historical context. Yet to understand its true significance, we must see it as part of a wider global moment—an era in which oppressed peoples across the world were rising against colonialism.
After the defeat of fascism in 1945 there was a deep sense of possibility. The victory over fascism fueled a new international moral order, embodied in the founding of the United Nations and its Charter, with its emphasis on human rights, self-determination, and peace. In the colonized world, this was accompanied by a wave of anti-colonial struggle, with growing demands for independence and equality. India gained independence in 1947. Ghana followed a decade later, in 1957.
In April 1955, two months before the Freedom Charter was adopted, 29 newly independent and colonized nations met in Bandung, Indonesia. The Bandung Conference gave voice to the aspirations of the global South—to end colonialism and racial domination, to assert autonomy in world affairs, and to build cooperation among formerly colonized peoples. Bandung was a declaration of global non-alignment and post-colonial confidence. It thrilled anti-colonial forces around the world.
The Freedom Charter emerged amid this excitement. It, too, was a declaration by an oppressed majority that they would not accept colonial domination. It expressed the same spirit of decolonization, the same insistence on democracy, equality, and national sovereignty. But it did not come from heads of state or official delegations—it came from the people themselves.
This period of hope was shadowed by a fierce imperial backlash. In Iran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s nationalization of oil in 1951 was met with a CIA- and MI6-backed coup in 1953, restoring the Shah and Western control over oil. In Guatemala, President Jacobo Árbenz’s modest land reforms provoked a similar response. In 1954 the CIA orchestrated his removal to protect U.S. corporate interests.
Across the world, moments of popular sovereignty were crushed to preserve imperial power. The Korean War (1950–53) marked the aggressive militarization of the Cold War and signaled that the global North would not easily cede control. A decade later, these counterrevolutions continued. In 1961, Congo’s first elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with the support of the CIA. In 1966, Kwame Nkrumah, who had declared that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa,” was overthrown in a coup supported by Western powers.
In South Africa, the vision set out in the Freedom Charter was swiftly met with state repression. Just months after its adoption, 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance were arrested and charged with treason in a trial that dragged on until 1961. Then came the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960, when police opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing 69 people. Within days, the apartheid regime banned the ANC and the PAC, forcing the liberation movements underground. In response, the ANC made the decision to turn to armed struggle.
Discussions of the Freedom Charter too often abstract it from the process that gave it life—a process that was profoundly democratic, consultative, and rooted in the daily lives of ordinary people. In 1953, the African National Congress and its partners in the Congress Alliance issued a call for a national dialogue: to ask, plainly and urgently, “What kind of South Africa do we want to live in?”
The response was remarkable. Across the country, in townships, rural villages, workplaces, churches, and various kinds of gatherings, people came together to develop their demands. Submissions arrived handwritten on scraps of paper, carefully composed on typewriters, or dictated to organizers. It was one of the most significant exercises in participatory democracy ever undertaken in South Africa.
The Charter was a statement of popular will, arrived at through a process that gave it profound legitimacy. It called not only for political rights, but for the redistribution of land, the sharing of the country’s wealth, and equality across race, gender, and class. It marked a decisive break with apartheid thinking and set out a radical vision for justice.
The Freedom Charter expressed a vision of South Africa grounded in equality, justice, and shared prosperity. It called instead for a radically democratic and redistributive order. “The People Shall Govern” was the opening clause—affirming not only the right to vote, but the deeper principle that power must reside with the people.
The declaration that “The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It,” challenged the dispossession at the heart of colonial and apartheid rule. Crucially, the Charter called for an economy based on public benefit rather than private profit: “The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people.”
Education, housing, and health care were to be universal and equal. The Charter demanded that “The Doors of Learning and of Culture Shall Be Opened,” insisting on access to knowledge and creative expression for all. It envisioned a South Africa without racism or sexism, where all would be “equal before the law,” with “peace and friendship” pursued abroad.
After the banning of the liberation movements in the 1960s and the brutal repression that followed, the Freedom Charter did not disappear—but it did recede from popular memory, its vision dimmed under the weight of censorship, exile, and political imprisonment. But in the 1980s, it surged back into public life with renewed force.
The formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983 in Cape Town, and the emergence of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985 in Durban, gave new organizational life to the Charter. These new and powerful social forces, drawing on community structures, civic associations, church groups, and trade unions, took the Charter out of the archives and into the streets. For both the UDF and the trade union movement, the Charter promised a future grounded in radical democracy and the redistribution of land and wealth.
As apartheid crumbled under the pressure of mass struggle, the Freedom Charter provided an essential reference point for the negotiations that began after the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990. It had become a moral compass and a unifying framework for the liberation movement. Its language and principles profoundly shaped elements of the 1996 Constitution.
The Charter’s insistence that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it” and that “the people shall govern” was carried through into the constitutional affirmation of non-racialism and universal suffrage. The guarantees of equality, dignity, and freedom of association all echo the Charter’s vision. Its influence is also evident in the recognition of socio-economic rights—such as the rights to housing, education, and healthcare—which were once radical demands shouted at rallies and are now enshrined in law.
But the transition also involved compromise. In the 1980s, the Charter had been taken up not just as a legal or symbolic document, but as a call for deep structural transformation, especially in the economy and land ownership. These demands were rooted in a mass politics of resistance—workplace occupations, street committees, and civic forums that embodied popular power.
At the settlement, however, key clauses—particularly those calling for the redistribution of land and the sharing of national wealth—were softened or deferred. The commitment to a unitary, non-racial state was defended. But economic clauses became points of contention. The final settlement preserved existing patterns of private property, including land ownership, and accepted a macroeconomic framework shaped in part by global neoliberal pressures. While the vote was won, the deeper transformations envisioned in the Charter were postponed.
The result is that today, thirty years after the end of apartheid, the structural inequalities remain. In 1998, Thabo Mbeki described South Africa as a country of “two nations”—one rich and white, the other poor and Black. That characterization remains disturbingly accurate. While a Black middle class and elite has now emerged, the vast majority of South Africans still live with the daily consequences of poverty, unemployment, and exclusion. The economic promises of the Freedom Charter—its commitment to sharing the wealth of the country—have not been fulfilled.
The 2024 general election marked a historic turning point. Taken together, the two dominant parties garnered support from less than a quarter of the eligible population. Nearly 60% of eligible voters did not participate at all, while a growing number remain unregistered. This reflects not apathy, but deep disillusionment with formal politics. The Charter’s promise that “the people shall govern” demands more than a vote—it requires active, sustained participation.
This means rebuilding mass democratic participation from below. It means rekindling the culture of popular meetings, community mandates, and worker-led initiatives that shaped political life in the 1980s and grounded the Freedom Charter in lived experience. It means going beyond elections and restoring a sense of everyday democratic agency—in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and unions. It means making good on the promise to redistribute land and wealth.
It also means rebuilding solidarity across the Global South. The formation of the Hague Group in January this year to build an alliance in support of Palestine was a major breakthrough, and the meeting it will hold in Bogotá in July promises to expand its reach and power.
But we must recognize the scale of resistance to such transformation. Powerful forces—both local and global—are deeply invested in the status quo. Economic elites and a set of NGOs, think tanks and media projects funded by Western donors work to frame redistributive politics as illegitimate, reckless, or authoritarian. These networks have grown increasingly bold as support for the ANC has declined.
In June 2023, the Brenthurst Foundation—funded by the Oppenheimer family—convened a conference in Gdańsk in Poland. Branded as a summit to “promote democracy,” the conference issued a “Gdańsk Declaration” that was an attempt to legitimize Western-backed opposition to progressive forces in Africa and the Global South. Present were the leaders of Democratic Alliance John Steenhuisen, IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa, former Daily Maverick editor Branko Brkic, and representatives of RENAMO (Mozambique), UNITA and UNITA-Renovada (Angola)—all organizations with historical ties to Western-backed counter-revolutionary forces.
The event marked the open emergence of a transnational alliance aimed at neutralizing any attempt to challenge elite power in the name of justice or equality. It is a reminder that the struggle to realize the Charter’s vision will not be won on moral terms alone—it will require effective political organization, ideological clarity, and courage. The Freedom Charter was born of struggle. It must now be defended and renewed through struggle.
– Ronnie Kasrils, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and South Africa’s former Minister for Intelligence Services, activist and author. He contributed this piece to The Palestine Chronicle
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.