SA belongs to all who lives in it, black and white…’

DAVID SAKS

On the preceding Tuesday evening, at the Rabbi Cyril Harris Community Centre, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies held a special commemorative function to celebrate this milestone event, which SAJBD President Zev Krengel described as the bedrock of the new, democratic South Africa.

Speakers included former President Kgalema Motlanthe and veteran anti-apartheid activist Leon Levy who, on behalf of the trade unions, had been one of the five original signatories to the Charter. Among the dignitaries present was Johannesburg Executive Mayor Parks Tau, who gave a warm introductory message, and Israel’s Ambassador to South Africa Arthur Lenk.

Levy described his involvement in the countrywide process of consultation that preceded the drafting of the Charter, and his memories of the Kliptown gathering itself, which carried on its business despite banning orders, arrests and massive police harassment and intimidation on the day itself. 

The Freedom Charter, he said, was “crafted from thousands of demands written on scraps of paper at hundreds of meetings held in factories and farms, townships, rural areas, universities and wherever people lived or worked”.

After its adoption, the Charter was at the centre of the four year-long Treason Trial. Levy himself was one of those put on trial, and eventually acquitted.

“I can bear witness to the incredible legal effort to brand the Charter as subversive. It was not, and in its own right it endures as a democratic beacon which proudly belongs to all of us,” he said.

Motlanthe said that one of the most significant ways in which the Freedom Charter differed from other historic documents heralding a new era in human affairs, such as the Magna Carta, was that it came about as “an inclusively shared vision” involving all the people and not just the social and intellectual elite.

“South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”, was the famous opening statement which Molanthe said showed how, in adopting this inclusive approach, the ANC was in many ways “evolving in opposite ways to the popular sea of Africanist consciousness engulfing the African continent”.

In choosing this course, the ANC was transcending narrowly-focused racial claims in favour of a progressive and humanist nationalism that embraced the entire population. This inclusive form of nationalism, he said, was “the highest form of social cohesion, where what unites us is much stronger than what divides us”.

Motlanthe took the opportunity to congratulate members of the Jewish community who had “sacrificed so much for the liberation of South Africa”, including making a sterling contribution to the Freedom Charter itself.

“It goes without saying that all those Jewish souls were men and women who had learnt from history. Motivated by the long history of anti-Semitism, their consciousness would not hear of human oppression in any way, shape or form,” he said.

Tau said he had been engaging extensively with the Jewish communal leadership in recent weeks on ways in which his office and the Jewish community could work together in realising the core aims of the Freedom Charter, particularly in promoting socio-economic equality.

Zev Krengel gave the welcoming address and closing remarks.