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

7. Anti-apartheid

65 7 Anti-apartheid The Afrikaner nationalist government which came to power in 1948 on the promise to bring about ‘apartheid’ (though its meaning was as yet by no means clear) successfully preyed on white fears that Smuts’s party contained closet liberals and that any concessions to blacks would result in the calamity of racial intermixture. The new regime duly embarked on a major legislative programme designed to entrench segregation. In response, the ANC launched ongoing campaigns of mass civil disobedience in order to resist apartheid’s ‘unjust laws’, including restrictions on blacks’ freedom of movement, residency, citizenship and political rights. A Joint Planning Council of the ANC and Indian Congress, which met in November 1951 to map out a programme of direct action and non-cooperation, stated as a ‘fundamental principle’ of the freedom struggle: ‘Full democratic rights with direct say in the affairs of the Government are the 66 inalienable rights of every individual – a right which in South Africa must be realised now if South Africa is to be saved from social chaos and tyranny and from the evils arising out of the existing denial of franchise rights to vast masses of the population on the grounds of race and colour.’83 Walter Sisulu followed this up in January 1952 with a letter (co-signed by the ANC president James Moroka) to Prime Minister D.F. Malan, notifying the government of the ANC’s intention to campaign against the country’s unjust laws. He recorded that the government ‘continues to insult and degrade the African people by depriving them of fundamental human rights enjoyed in all democratic communities’. The reply by Malan’s private secretary took issue with this point and gave voice to an explanation based on biological race determinism: ‘I think, that it is selfcontradictory to claim as an inherent right of the Bantu who differ in many ways from the Europeans that they should be regarded as not different, especially when it is borne in mind that these differences are permanent and not man-made. If this is a matter of indifference to you and if you do not value your racial characteristics, you cannot in any case dispute the European’s right, which in this case is definitely an inherent right, to take the opposite view and to adopt the necessary measures to preserve their identity as a separate community.’84 67 This intractable response was diametrically opposed to the firm but reasonable tone of Sisulu’s letter, whose references to constitutionalism and nonracism were beginning to sound time-worn. From within the ANC, liberal-democratic human rights discourse was being challenged from two directions. RadicalAfricanists,vocalintheANC’sinfluentialYouth League, rejected the ethos of ‘non-racism’ that seemed to give disproportionate political weight to whites, Coloureds and Indians, especially those associated with the Communist Party. These tensions ultimately led to a split in the ANC and the formation in 1959 of the Pan Africanist Congress, whose views were closely attuned to those of decolonising Africa. From the left, the Communist Party was also disdainful of the language of human rights, especially if this connoted a form of bourgeois constitutionalism that neglected the primacy of class-based oppression. Heavily influenced by Stalinist thinking on the ‘national question’, while at the same time fixated by the ‘uniqueness’ of South Africa’soppressivesystem,communistsbegantodebate the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ or ‘colonialism of a special type’. This doctrine came to be reformulated in the thesis that the ‘national democratic revolution’ (that is, African nationalism) should be supported as a precondition for the emergence of revolutionary socialism. In this way communists could justify 68 their entry into an alliance with the forces of African nationalism (the ANC).85 At the historic Congress of the People in 1955, the ANC was confirmed as first among equals within a liberation movement that was now structured as a parallel organisational alliance comprising interest groups (trade unionists and women) and peoples (African, Coloured, Indian and white). The radical tone of the Freedom Charter, which was adopted at this Congress, signalled a departure from the wartime aspirations of the ANC, which had laid such stress on blacks as equal citizens and equal human beings. Although the ANC’s national conference in December 1954 had envisaged the Freedom Charter as ‘the South African people’s declaration of human rights’, this formulation was played down as the Charter took shape. Increasingly, the theory of...