TEMBEKA NGCUKAITOBI | The betrayal of Freedom Charter is seen through decay, corruption everywhere one looks in SA

For a document of so much endurance and influence, the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter’s adoption has been a muted affair. And maybe in the silence lies the message.

The Freedom Charter stands betrayed by the ruling elite whose prime occupation has been their own preservation of power, prestige and privilege in the name of the people.

Yet “the people” — the inspiration of the Charter — are used as voting fodder, spectators in the game, and worse, subjected to debilitating crime and violence in at the hands of the state and private actors. 

The evidence of the betrayal of the Charter abounds. Everywhere one looks: decaying infrastructure, astronomical levels of crime and violence, abandoned schools, accumulation of capital and land, the disarray of the land reform process, and rampant corruption exposed by the Zondo commission.

But this is not why I wrote this piece. I wrote it for a modest reason: to explore the forgotten and often misunderstood origins of the Freedom Charter. 

The name Professor Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews, also better known as ZK Matthews, is remembered today perhaps as a building at Unisa, or a student residence at Fort Hare University.

Yet there was a time where when his influence in black politics was so significant and deep that Chief Albert Luthuli couldn’t conceive of any major intellectual project in the life of the ANC African National Congress without ZK Matthews.

Professor Matthews had qualified both in law and anthropology, having studied at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, including Yale University and the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. A lecturer at the then University College of Fort Hare, he went on to become its occupy higher office of principal. of the College. 

As a professor of law, he was admired by his students, who included future leaders of the nation, Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Oliver Tambo. Nelson Mandela writes fondly of ZK Matthews. And so does Monica Wilson, who was among the staff members at Fort Hare between 1944 and 1946 when ZK was already professor in anthropology.

MonicaWilson's students were themselves an impressive lot: take Godfrey Pitje and Archie Mafeje, for example. Pitje became a leading lawyer in SA South African and a founder of the Black Lawyers Association during the darkest days of apartheid. Mafeje remains one of the most impressive academics SA to have been produced. by South Africa. The influence of ZK Matthews thus goes far and wide.

A little-known fact is that ZK is also the father of the Freedom Charter. In 1953, Matthews he was the president of the Cape wing of the ANC. African National Congress. It held its annual conference in August of that year, in Cradock. Matthews delivered his address on the 15th.

That speech laid the foundation for the Freedom Charter, some two years later. Matthews noted the aggression of the racial policy of apartheid, targeting the clauses in the then South African constitution that guaranteed the franchise to coloured and native people. Matthews proposed a Congress of the People “at which all sections of the population might be represented to consider the kind of SA which they should like to see in the future, in which the legitimate rights of all sections of the population might be adequately safeguarded”.

This proposal by Matthews's proposal had a profound impact on the delegates. By the end of the conference, a resolution was passed: “That the Conference notes with interest the remarks of the President on the need for the establishment at the instance of the ANC and under its leadership of a Congress of the People in SA to draw up, inter alia, a Freedom Charter or constitution embodying a vision of the future SA as we in Congress see it ... such a Congress of the People would serve to unite all democratic forces in SA among all races into a front against the dangers of fascism.”

In December 1953, the ANC’s national conference was held in Queenstown (now Komani). The proposals by the Cape wing of the organisation at the Cradock conference were presented. They received universal support, with a resolution being passed “to make immediate preparations for the organisation of a Congress of the People of SA, whose task shall be to work out a ‘Freedom Charter’ for all peoples and groups in the country”. Chief Albert Luthuli, then president-general of the ANC, asked Matthews for a memorandum on the idea behind a national Congress of the People, which was adopted as working policy by the party’s national executive committee.

Student protests at Fort Hare in May and June 1955 meant that Matthews was unable to attend the national congress on 25 and 26 June, when the Freedom Charter was adopted. But his vision was realised when the Charter was adopted with universal support.

Matthews would later be unjustly incarcerated, spending more than 135 days in detention before the famous acquittal in the so called “Treason Trial” of 1956 where he was the main witness for the defence, presenting a compelling defence of the Charter, and refusing the false claims that the Charter was a “communist document”.

The idea behind the charges laid against Mathews and others were that they had planned to violently overthrow the state. This was false, argued Matthews. And equally false was the idea that the land clauses in the Freedom Charter were intended to create communist or socialist land patterns. But he was firm on principle, even as he stood as an accused.

The “root cause”, he testified, was the Native Land Act: “Redistribution of land is not a new principle. It appears in the African Claims document. It goes even further back — right to the Land Act of 1913. The distribution of land which was then made was regarded as unfair and has been so regarded throughout.”

The Freedom Charter remains an inspirational document. Its opening words, “We the people”, are filled with profundity in setting a democratic vision for SA. They show the way in insisting on a government based on the will of the people and why no government can claim legitimacy if it is not based on the will of the people.

We see those words, “We the people”, now inscribed in the opening words of the constitution, a document which turned 30 just the other day.

In that sense, the vision of ZK remains embodied in the supreme law of this country. While many of the Freedom Charter aspirations remain unfulfilled, today we can remember the man whose vision it was that the SA of the future belongs to all who live in it, black and white — Professor ZK Matthews.

• Ngcukaitobi is the author of Land Matters: South Africa’s Failed Land Reforms and the Road Ahead