The Freedom Charter does not have an obvious interpretation which stands in place from generation to generation. How we interpret the document is affected by where we are located, what our interests are in looking at the Charter, what we hope for, and what resonates with the Charter in terms of aspirations that people have for a better life. Obviously, the conditions - of any time - impact on what can be done to provide basic needs and realise the aspirations of the Charter.

It's now 70 years since the Freedom Charter was adopted at the Congress of the People on 26 June 1955. There are still many things to learn about the Charter, some of which entail what I would suggest ought to be a revision of how we understand the document.

Just as we used to say that the Congress of the People, the way the Freedom Charter was created was a process and not an event, the same is true of the Charter itself. Its meaning was not finalised on the day of its adoption on 26 June 1955. Its meanings (in the plural) must be modified in different conditions as we grow and learn more and our democratic consciousness may develop.

The first thing to notice is that the Charter emerged from a process of extensive consultation, not simply from the President of the ANC saying that there was extensive consultation, as Cyril Ramaphosa does in relation to the national dialogue. (President Cyril Ramaphosa: Announcement on the National Dialogue10 Jun 2025 https://www.gov.za/news/speeches/president-cyril-ramaphosa-announcement-national-dialogue-10-jun-2025).

The Congress of the People process is now well documented and statements of participants testify to its entailing arduous consultations with people from all walks of life in order to access the views from a range of classes and strata. (See Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Conin, 50 Years of the Freedom Charter, 2006 and Ismail Vadi, The Congress of the People and Freedom Charter: A People’s History, 2015).

The Freedom Charter was adopted as a consensual document, a consensus emerging from a long process of demands being heard and recorded and distilled into the short document that is accessible, and has remained part of many people’s political development and part of their ways of evaluating the present and progress towards realising freedoms today.

An example of changing meanings is with one of the key clauses of the Freedom Charter which reads that “The People shall Govern!”, and until recently that was interpreted to mean that people would have the right to elect representatives to Parliament. It does remain the understanding of many.

That is why in the book that I wrote with Jeremy Cronin, one has Dorothy Nyembe, who served 18 years in prison, singing about the Freedom Charter that the people were going to vote for Chief Albert Luthuli (then ANC President), Dr Monty Naicker (then President of the Natal Indian Congress and Dr Yusuf Dadoo (then President of the Transvaal Indian Congress) to lead them into Parliament.

So the notion of “the people shall govern!” entailed realisation of its meaning through voting for parliament, what is known as representative democracy.

Some 30 years later in the People's Power period of the UDF in a number of parts of the country, one saw people taking control of their own destiny at a local level, kicking out the police and Bantu administration officials of the apartheid regime. They then created their own street committees, block committees and other projects of self-government at a local level with the meaning being similar to “The People Shall Govern!”, but at a local level and with the masses taking direct control.

One of the people who was interviewed in this period, Weza Made from Uitenhage, said specifically that what they were doing with the People's Power period was to implement the first clause of the Freedom Charter, “The People Shall Govern!”.

This illustrates what it means to give meanings to something like the Freedom Charter. The meaning of words must be constantly re-thought in the light of new experiences. In striving for freedom, these become part of our understanding.

In fact, one must give a new meaning in the context of the present where one has an election-centred notion of freedom. There may be diverse notions of what it means to exercise political freedom, and it need not mean that ideas of popular power ought to be suppressed or, alternatively, that representative democracy must give way to popular, direct democracy.

We should see freedom as involving a combination of popular power and popular inputs into all organs of government. Right now, there are limited spaces for popular inputs into legislation and other processes of government, and there is zero official space for popular, direct democracy.

That is the official space, but there are unofficial spaces for the popular, notably inhabited by the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. There may be others who without publicity can be characterised as popular democratic sites.

Representative and popular democracy are not antagonistic to one another if the meaning of representative democracy is to give voice to the voters who are not present in Parliament and other elected bodies. but have delegated the representative to carry out their interests, to re-present them in the organs of Parliament, as if they were there.

The Freedom Charter and nation building

In the Struggle against apartheid, much of the discussion and debate among comrades who were fighting for a free South Africa related to what is called the “national question”, or sometimes “nation building” or what comprised a new nation. In thinking more about the Freedom Charter, I've come to believe that one of its key products was a contribution towards nation building. In the course of this short document, you have a number of propositions.

These headings of parts of the Freedom Charter themselves comprise a vision of the new South Africa, that the Charter and the people who made it believe should comprise what a new nation should be. What is useful for us is that these are not scientific categories in the main, but moral qualities that ought to inform us. The headings under which these political and moral qualities emerge are:

The People Shall Govern!

All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights!

The People Shall Share in The Country’s Wealth!

The Land Shall Be Shared among Those Who Work It!

All shall be equal before the law!

All shall enjoy equal human rights!

There shall be work and security!

The doors of learning and culture shall be opened!”

There shall be housing security and comfort!

There shall be peace and friendship!

Charterists and the Role of the Freedom Charter in the Congress Movement

Those who supported the ANC-led liberation movement were often referred to as Charterists. That was one of the key bases for delineating who belonged in the Congress movement, who supported the leadership of the ANC and the UDF.

In working on these lines of demarcation, the main thing was to convince the public that the Congress movement, as opposed to other movements, best represented their interests. The Freedom Charter would be alluded to as one of the bases on which that claim was made.

But there was not room at that time for careful scrutiny of all the clauses of the Charter and to give it meanings that had some authority within the organisations. I think this is true of a lot of ideas that were used to rally people and get people to rally behind a document like the Freedom Charter.

This is not the same as giving it a definitive meaning. In some ways, that is a strength in that hopefully people start to debate the meanings of documents of the liberation movement in a time of peace. Unfortunately, that has not happened from what I can see.

The Freedom Charter as a Nation-Building Document and Unifying Vision for South Africa

The Freedom Charter emerged as a national project of the ANC and its allies. In that sense, it was a popular process of consultation to hear people’s views as evidenced in the documentation of the Congress of the People campaign. On the one hand, it was a popular process, but on the other, it was part of national liberation, a project for building a new nation, a new nation with a series of values that it sought assistance in getting people to make their own preferences, expressing what worried them in South Africa of the time and what they saw as remedying the problems that they faced.

The Freedom Charter is a nation-building document and does not go into details like a constitution, but it sought to elicit from people ideas as to what their future should be. It's a document that tries to join people and to find ways of binding people.

That is why throughout the document one finds stirring allusions to the unity of the people and ways of joining people to one another.

Raymond Suttner has written extensively on the Freedom Charter, including 50 Years of the Freedom Charter, (with Jeremy Cronin, 2006).