South Africa's Struggle for Human Rights: The History of Rights in South Africa

6. The Second World War and its aftermath

55 6 The Second World War and its aftermath During the Second World War the ANC underwent revival as a mass-based organisation, its radicalism spearheaded by members of the newly constituted ANC Youth League, whose Johannesburg-based activists (including Anton Lembede, A.P. Mda, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela) were increasingly prominent. During this era the rhetoric of African nationalism began to focus fully on the illegitimacy – rather than the unfairness – of white power, and on the necessity of replacing minority with majority rule. In conjunction with rights-based rather than rights-conditional approaches to citizenship, such thinking signalled a major change in expectations and entitlement. Whereas African nationalist leaders had routinely petitioned the Queen or King in their capacity as subjects of the monarchy until after the First World War (the phrase ‘we humbly submit’ was 56 often employed by delegations), the Second World War soon put an end to such deferential discourse. The emergence of mass-based politics, a growing international discourse of democratic rights and freedoms, and a developing anti-colonial sentiment in AfricaandAsia,allhelpedtoentrenchtheideathattobe an African was ipso facto to be a South African citizen, and that certain fundamental rights flowed directly from this status. This was a worldwide phenomenon. As Lake and Reynolds point out, the discussions that led to the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights were framed ‘not in terms of the equality of nations or races, as Japan had proposed twenty years earlier, but in the French and American traditions of the rights of individuals and the principle of non-discrimination, enunciated in 1929 by the Institut de Droit International’.66 Along with new ideas about democracy, words like ‘welfare’ and ‘citizenship’ became defining terms in the 1940s. The wartime reshaping of the ANC as a national organisation with a growing mass base (incorporating social democratic, communist and Africanist ideas) can be seen in key documents such as Africans’ Claims in South Africa (including The Atlantic Charter from the Standpoint of Africans), which was adopted by acclaim as official ANC policy in 1943. The drafting committee was chaired by Professor Z.K. Matthews, 57 whose intellectual imprint is clear in the document’s espousal of democratic rights, citizenship, human dignity and anti-colonial national self-determination. Africans’ Claims included a bill of rights, which began by demanding, as a matter of urgency, the granting of ‘full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa’.67 As well as being the ANC’s most ambitious and clear statement of African political aspirations and rights to date – including full adult suffrage – it is also notable for the way in which it genuinely universalised the meaning of freedom set out in the Atlantic Charter (rather against the wishes of Churchill, who immediately regretted that the phrase ‘all the men in all the lands’ in the Atlantic Charter might be taken as pertaining to the imperial context as well).68 The document has been aptly characterised as ‘a resolute assertion by Africans of their equal status in the community of humankind’.69 A recent (2005) effort by Kader Asmal and others to unify the tradition of human rights thinking in the ANC correctly identifies Africans’ Claims as a foundational text but also argues, rather implausibly, that the document ‘refutes any claim that the very idea of human rights was inherited from Europe or North America’.70 The wartime years formed a moment in South Africa when international progressive (as well as fascist) ideas were circulating with unprecedented 58 speed.71 New approaches to rights, citizenship and nationhood were everywhere in the air and the Atlantic Charter resonated in many parts of the colonial world, Africa included. In Nigeria, for instance, the nationalist leader and editor Nnamdi Azikiwe took up the Charter in his Lagos newspaper, The West African Pilot. In 1943 he and other journalists presented the British Colonial Office with a memorandum, The Atlantic Charter and British West Africa, which called for Nigerian independence.72 During the 1940s long-standing transatlantic links were reaffirmed with African Americans by the ANC president Alfred B. Xuma, who forged a political alliance with the American pan-Africanist-inclined Council on African Affairs, led by Paul Robeson and Max Yergan. The Council on African Affairs looked to support the transatlantic African diaspora and ‘international anti-colonialism’.73 It was with the overt support of this radical organisation that Xuma...