A BEQUEATHED FREEDOM CHARTER AS THE SOUL OF THE NATION
The cohesion of a nation is always found in what is defined as its soul. Successful nations and democracies were and still are able to weather most storms as a result of their reliance on what defines them, rather than what they materially possess. It is in the definition of a nation’s soul that it can derive its norms and values. The norms and values that are detached from a nation’s soul have a tendency to reduce nations to demagogue worshippers thus breeding dictatorships of various kinds. A soul of a nation is a natural departure point to lay a basis for that nation’s definition.
A national soul can be defined as self-awareness, or consciousness, unique to a particular society and is construed as being distinct from its inhabitants and can survive the death of generations and propel the birth of new ones . A national soul should therefore be a true basis for its consciousness and should be immortal in all conceivable respects. The construction of a national soul has a direct relationship with time and the history of the society it occurs within. The most visible emptiness in being a South African has always been aggregated into the absence of nationhood and therefore national soul. As a consequence of this emptiness in the national soul, almost all South African electoral battles have been fought in a manner that reinforces the divisive defaults lines created by our chequered past. The racial-ethnic overtones of the pre-1994 electoral and liberation campaigns have since been reworked into ever-changing euphemisms designed to either maintain established socio-economic and political comfort zones or derail the nation-building assignment. An own group self-serving cult has developed at the expense of a common national consciousness.
The continued absence of a national soul defining centre creates in multi-ethnic, multi-racial and cosmopolitan societies a vacuum that can only be filled by maverick leadership. Race and class based slogans like ‘swart gevaar’, ‘fight back’, ‘1996 class project’ and lately ‘value based society’ easily become currencies to mediate the political control exchange market. In each instance the slogans reflect an unsaid ideological stand point that creates us and them attitude.
Swaart gevaar’ represented a segregationist ideology with a Victorian racist ideological flair designed to sustain non-black hegemony over South African society; the extent to which this has stopped is an academic question especially with the resurgence of the ‘Stop Zuma’ equivalent from the2009 electioneering anals.
‘Fight-back’ represented a victim mentality that saw the democratic breakthrough and its restitutive imperative as some form of ‘war’. Rooted in the Shepstonian divide and rule paradigm of native control and management, this approach sought to create within the South African ‘nation’ an aura of racial-ethnic-cum-class victimhood.
The ‘1996 Class project’ represented an anti-leftist artefact to access power from a non-racially colluding elite that was focused on preserving interests that were perceived to be incongruent with the so-called ‘National Democratic Revolution’.
‘Value centred leadership’ represents the traditional in-African divisive tendency of the ‘qhoboka versus baqa’ classifications. These divide brings to prominence the black educated elite’s attitude towards the illiterate majority. In all instances, justified or not, the slogans tend to ignore the mainstream nation-building imperatives of this era.
The existence of a national soul defining artefact and/or ideology will present South Africa with a cause to die for; otherwise potentially honest revolutionaries can easily be criminalised in this vacuum. The continuously shifting basis of our nationhood creates, and as a consequence of nationhood absence, uncertainty that manifests itself as low national morale and therefore unproductive socio-economic conduct as manifest in high levels of racially, class and ethnic motivated criminality. The growing social illegality is traceable to the absence of a somewhat gladiatorial national soul that may be harnessed to mitigate such ills.
The growing emotional draught associated with our national consciousness reveal a glaring absence of foundation objectives to transcend our hostile past. The historical account of our nationhood with its skewed celebration of hegemonic co-existence generates more patrimony than mutual respect for contributions made by those that inhabited this shores before. The movement to redefine our nationhood through celebrating a shared past may prove to be nothing more than the beginning of a major cultural gear-shift in which the basic socio-political, and even economic, resources shift from the invisible to the tangible.
If we (as South Africans) accept that it is through our various affiliations to our past that we will discover that, by changing the inner attitudes of our minds we can change the outer aspects of our general national fellowship. The need to have an ability to celebrate the anti-colonial heroic contributions of Prime Minister HF Verwoerd within a context that discounts his apartheid beliefs will for instance go a long way towards bringing various affiliations to our past together. This should be celebrated within a context that acknowledges the damaging social engineering Apartheid mess that hosted this historical breakthrough.
The need for a path finding ideological basis for one South Africanness is greater today than it has been. Assuming that our soul should yield a permanent self-awareness unique to our being as a melted society, we need to adopt a set of dictums that are going to define our future. Our history should then be celebrated in the context of it having contributed jointly and severally to the envisaged state. For instance, should we find that the 1948 National Party victory and its subsequent administration created a solid base for one or more of the dictums underpinning our national consciousness?; then it must be obligatory for all to celebrate the victory.
The task of weaving a national consciousness needs to be threaded through a series of acceptable principles that are defined in outcome terms thus painting a new state of a nation. The new nation-state should be timeless in nature thereby creating for future generations a platform upon which contestation for management of power accessing mechanisms such as government is to be based. The expression of the new nation-state has historically been codified in legally adoptable documents that define a long accumulation of precedents and conventions that embodied common norms and values. The documentation of these soul defining prescripts and/or dictums is best managed when the process is allowed to reflect itself as being more unwritten and thus dependent on volition.
In the midst of most nation building chronicles defining South Africa, The 1955 Freedom Charter emerges as the closest soul-creating list of national demands and dictums; particularly as a chronicle of reasoned content disassociated from its ideological origins. The process that was followed in the collection of societal views, the composition of the adopting ‘Congress of the People’ and the actual outcome of the Congress lend credence to the Freedom Charters’ status as a base document for nationhood weaving.
South Africa’s inaugural Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Former ANC President Chief Albert Luthuli captures this national soul weaving capabilities of the freedom Charter as follows ‘it attempts to give flesh and blood meaning, in the South African setting, of such words as democracy, freedom and liberty…It is by no means a perfect document. But its motive must be understood, as must the deep yearning for security and human dignity from which it springs’ (Luthuli;1961). However, in the quest to accept the Freedom Charter as a thread that can weave past and present divisive default lines, there are a number of preconditions that must be met by the Charter.
The concept people in the Freedom Charter needs redefinition in order to be understood in the spirit of nation building. The definition of the people should be stripped of the triumphalism often associated with post liberation struggle rhetoric. The need to understand the people outside the repertoire of concepts of the anti-apartheid struggle, particularly its language and metaphors is greater in the bequeathing process than what is chronicled (Chipkin 2003, 25). The notion of seeing ‘the people’ as being primarily the poor and by extension blacks needs to be removed from the South African political terminological nomenclature. The country’s future should be designed outside the coordinates of past conflicts. The meaning of people in the Freedom Charter should be strictly limited to its literal meaning and never have class or any prejudiced connotation.
The notion of our country should be revisited in an ideological sense and more critically in behaviour to reflect a welcoming spirit for the so-called ‘non-indigenous’. The in-country xenophobic reclassification of sections of our population disguised in the social ordering through colour and creed needs to be repudiated. Society should graduate to a point where every citizen is seen as South African outside the physical features that define his biological and race make-up.
The aspect of national groups in the Charter should be properly contextualised to disallow and discourage cessation tendencies often associated with ethnic self-determination and preservation. The contextualisation of the Charter for this role should have a view that entrenches with treasonous consequences the unity of South Africa as it was in 1910. The national psyche should be galvanised to levels where ethnicity is seen as a threat to national stability and should therefore be reduced to an abhorrent manifestation of the highest form of cultural self-aggrandizement.
The aspect of equality before the law needs to be stripped of its potential re-colonising nature. The legal system that must underpin the equality may have to be reviewed without vitiating the dictums or soul pillars. The manner in which society deals with those that violates set rules and regulation is the cornerstone of that society’s civilisation and therefore value system. Law becomes therefore a critical aspect for building a nation’s soul hence it is important not to dislocate its application from the underlying societal norms and values. The growth in sophistication of a legal system should be commensurate with the general societal growth.
The culture that needs to emerge out of the opened doors as envisaged by the Freedom Charter needs to be woven along the lines of melting the various default exclusionist tendencies institutionalised over the entire constitutional history of South Africa. The definition of the South African culture as opposed to promoting ethno-racial customs and traditions to the disadvantage of a common culture requires attention. It will probably be critical to melt into one those aspects of our various ethnic cultural practises thus building an organic South African culture.
The above conditions procure for a re-look at The Freedom Charter as adopted in 1955. The positioning of the Charter as a centrifugal force driving the heartbeat of our nation being and therefore the soul requires from the South African community a resolve to rework the way it is written; this is notwithstanding it being an ANC document to be bequeathed. The process of reworking the Charter should be, and as a last step of our long walk to (total) freedom, be inclusive and culminate in the holding of a national soul building convention. The management of the process towards the convention should be assigned to institutions that may be perceived to be apolitical.
NATION BUILDING AS A NEW FRONTIER FOR THE ANC.
The national reconciliation task has been executed by President Mandela to levels where society began to believe that the Mandela reconciliation represented the ultimate in being a South African; part of the reason why the Mandela brand is growing into both a national ornament and monument; hence the pre-eminent Mandela brand grab by politically inspired formations including political parties. The Mandela reconciliation smoothed the path towards actual nation building. The symbolic fundamentals of common flag, anthem, national symbol, constitution and the ‘rugby jersey number 6 gimmicks’ presided by the Mandela created a setting fit for the real nation-building exercise to commence. The South African constitution as an agreement detailing the desired arrangement of government and governance for continued co-existence must, and in national soul building terms, provide a vital binding force directing custodians of the established state machinery towards a common future (Gould and Kolb 1964).
The national soul building process would not have found any resonance with the historically marginalised unless an institutionalised process of restitution was set in motion. The logical successor for a reconciliation era would have only been institutionalised restitution. The Thabo Mbeki administration will be favourably presented by history as the ablest of its time to institutionalise restitution within a reconciliatory paradigm notwithstanding its pro-black overtones that unintentionally created a new marginalised community, closest to it in South African history terms would be the immediate post 1948 and DF Malan era of race-based ‘equalisation’ that spurned current commanding heights of the South African economy. The actual implementation of such institutionalisation will however become the most visible of all blots on the Mbeki restitution agenda successes. The national soul crafting process and therefore nation-building assignment became a consequential casualty of institutionalised restitution in both eras.
The elevation of the Freedom Charter to become a national soul weaving dictum would require a leadership that embraces the reconciliatory foundation set by Mandela and a Mbeki-type institutionalising vigour underpinned by a deliberate drive to build a nation. The post 1948 race-based nation building assignment was driven by ethnic minority intent on imposing its version of nationalism. The demise of the assignment can be traced to its inability to be inclusive of other races as well as the competing appeal of its alternative as enshrined in the Freedom Charter and comparable documents of that era. However, the often uncelebrated, successes of this assignment as manifest in the creation of a near first world economic infrastructure, state bureaucracy as well as a decolonised mindset was premised on the existence of a vision enjoining the non-black protagonists of the apartheid system.
The absence of Black nationalists, since most of them were either incarcerated or forced into exile, robbed the country of an opportunity to non-racially be a nation. The result of this state of affairs was to create a non-racially inspired leadership that was and could not be socialised into the actual milieu of being South African. Notwithstanding, the African National Congress dominated liberation movement grew to become the foremost organised representation of non-racial nationalism albeit being an absentee custodian. The need therefore for the ANC, to restore the actual meaning of the ‘National’ in the African National Congress has arrived.
The founding ANC Youth league generation entrenched the congress tradition and thus claimed its stake to history as having secured the real meaning on being a congress member. Literally fast forwarded to the post 1994 era, the congress tradition translates into the one person one vote thus securing, and almost to eternity, the centrality of majority rule. With Africans being the current majority, it will be their will to redefine through the ballot the then dominant understanding of congress tradition. The United States of America’s miracle of raising to leadership an African American, President Barak Obama, in a sea of a non-African American majority lends credence to the congress tradition to potentially have new expressions via society’s will. In fact, it was Robert Sobukwe, an African leader to emerge from the ANC Youth League formation era who said that he ‘sees no reason why, in a free democratic Africa, a predominantly black electorate should not return a white man to parliament, for colour will count for nothing in Free Africa’ (PAC Monograph, 4)
The Lembede-Mandela generation of ANC leaders went further to define the African in the ANC. The African was expanded to include all race groups on condition that they subscribe to a defined criterion. The criteria was in the main premised on loyalty to South Africa as opposed to a colonial power, accepting the equality of humanity in the eyes of any universal definition, and a pledge to defend continuation of being African. The expansion was finally codified into law when the Constitution of South Africa was enacted into law during the Mandela presidential term.
The definition of national was also clarified in the Lembede-Mandela era, but could not find expression except in the lettered annals of the ANC and other like-minded organisations across the colour spectrum. The ANC is in a pole position to institutionalise the national through to society. The character of the ANC as a liberation movement and a registered political party is at this stage one of the most valuable assets for this endeavour to succeed or fail. The question becomes thus; can the NASREC Mandate ANC rise-up to the challenge?
TO BE CONTINUED
Comments
Post a Comment