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Is Africa celebrating 50 years of the Freedom Charter?
2005-07-26 08:09:18
By Ani Jozeni
South Africans and quite a number of ex-campaigners against apartheid, in many countries in the world, a few of whom might still be around campaigning against globalisation, had a date to mark last week.
It is the 50 years since the Freedom Charter came up in June 1955 in South Africa, to give a reasoned and passionate response to the white minority’s apartheid policies then in place. It sought to break barriers of race, colour.
For a South African living in Tanzania and definitely a number of other countries in the sub-region, it might dawn on them that the purposes of the Freedom Charter need to be extended.
While it was purely a South Afican document, a need might now be felt to get its principles applied to the rest of the continent, that we others should also seek to cross limitations of race or colour. We may soon learn it is vital for development.
South Africans themselves no longer refer to the white people there as Boers, much as the feelings are still intense, and in many ways they are disregarded.
Photographs have appeared in newspapers of a white man driving with his dog on the front seats of a pick up, and then a black labourer sitting in the back, in the wind. Nor could news of SADF units taking range exercises shooting at portraits of President Mbeki uplift spirits.
With South Africa as the leading investor in the region, a key link between the sub-region and globalisation, these attitudes may prove damaging to these links.
There is now a situation where Pan-Africanism stops at the borders of South Africa, now associated with colonialism and neo-colonialism, the way Kenyan writer Philip Ochieng was putting it the other day.
Tanzania is now ’grovelling before Anglo-Saxon imperialism;’ while a ’kaburu’ gets a work permit in a day, a Kenyan may have to wait for months, or fail to get such permit.
Leave aside issues of ideological animosity between Kenya and Tanzania or the usually tense relations between Kenya and the new South Africa even during the first years with Nelson Mandela at the helm.
The question is how far Africa as a whole needs a Freedom Charter that permits its treating of anyone living within its borders, or who may wish to come in, equally.
Asians live here like Jews in Europe, much earlier.
How far they can do business and what they can own, whether they can contest for Parliament or being accepted as local government councillors is a matter to be decided by ’policy.’
When they start gaining the confidence of the population, chauvinistic sections start wondering if this isn’t a way of letting the country be purchased by those with cash. That is true of local Indians or South African investors picking up shares.
What perhaps may not have been resolved so far is whether African countries need to take up the beliefs of the Freedom Charter or they can do without them.
For if this was the case, plenty of the limitations engulfing it would be removed, as the more investment-oriented sections of each country’s population would feel free to pick up assets and build up capital. Instead, second class citizens feel constrained to export capital gains.
At the start of its freedom struggle, the ruling party here also took up elements of what would look like the more elaborate Freedom Charter.
It has explicit expressions of faith that ’binadamu wote ni ndugu zangu na Afrika ni moja,’but this has been slumbering as an explicit dimension of either policy or public sentiment. It is hard to say that people think of resident Asians, even when their forefathers were here in 1900, as ’ndugu.’
While people of the farthest tribes in the numerous regions and outlying rural lands can say with firmness that ’our’ national assets should not be sold to foreigners, Asians can hardly do so.
Yet many among their grandfathers perished while building railways in East Africa, a monumental literary piece to this memory being the novel ’Simba wa Tsavo,’ a classic of Swahili literature.
It isn’t their contribution that we question, but seek to sideline them for reasons of either colour of discriminations arising from religion, which are real.
Nor indeed is all that is purely local well enough, for instance when a livestock keeper feeds his cattle on maize or other crop, and then if the peasant protests, he asks ’’which is more valuable, a cow or the maize.’’
While this outlook is distinctly parochial in its character, it is touching off fighting in so many parts of the country, such that it requires a sort of Freedom Charter to determine each group’s rights and responsibilities in economic action.
It doesn’t seem that the ruling party or civil society groups are ready for such enterprise.
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