accept that those in positions of leadership in the ANC’s economics team set out deliberately and solely for personal benefit or glory to sell out the ANC’s historical commitment to social and economic justice; and we do not accept that the ‘sell-out’ occurred as a result of some kind of conspiracy and secret late-night meetings that involved international financial institutions and local capital.
Our research reveals many weaknesses in the ANC economics team, in its capabilities and experience, and in the processes and practices involved in the debate and negotiations around forging a post-apartheid economic strategy. It is also clear that some important progressive economic policy alternatives were ignored and then unceremoniously discarded. There are many complex and overlapping explanations for this, as we suggest in chapters 4 and 5.
We accept the existence of multiple influences – both economic and political, and both internal and external – on ANC economic thinking in the 1990s. While we point to such multiple influences and stress some that may have been underestimated or downplayed to date, we would like to emphasise upfront that it is not our intention in this book to offer any kind of mathematical or sociological ‘weighting’ of these multiple influences or indeed to ‘finger’ anyone or any group within or outside the ANC for what happened. We plan to provide the narrative of economic and social policy debates and thinking within the ANC Alliance in the 1990s as we saw it, warts and all,2 as trained social science and economic researchers, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, but also from our own perspectives as participants in some of these events.
It must also be stressed at the outset that we do not claim that we have mastered the whole story in every respect. This exercise has proven to be extremely difficult to research. Some participants in the drama of the 1990s with whom we were keen to speak were reluctant to grant us interviews; records, even those at some official archives, are still not complete or easy to access systematically; and there are likely to be records and personal recollections scattered across the nation and internationally that we were not even aware of. So all in all, if there are gaps and some misinterpretations, as there undoubtedly will be, we hope that this is understandable. Our aspiration is that we have begun to pave the way for later researchers to pick up and develop these threads more fully, until one day a more robust and sustainable record of these globally celebrated, yet complex, times is achieved.
CHAPTER
2
African Claims, the Freedom Charter and Social Democracy, 1943–1960
THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC IDEAS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM IN THE 1940S
The period between 1939 and 1945 was a significant one for the development of inclusive social policies that created the possibility of a social democratic option for a post-war, post-segregation South Africa. The war against fascism led to many white workers enlisting in the army. This meant that the United Party government under Jan Smuts was forced to depend on black economic and political support for the Allied war effort, of which South Africa was a part. The need to maintain ‘industrial peace’ in Smuts’ phrase (Hansard, vol. 43, 1942, col. 5) and fearing Japanese invasion after the collapse of Singapore in February 1942, the United Party established a series of commissions on a post-war ‘people’s charter’. This included examination of the social needs of urban Africans, who were the bedrock of industrial growth and thus the war effort. These social policy reviews in health, education and welfare represented the most extensive examination of the effects of poverty and lack of social service provision in South African history, only surpassed by the democratic government of Nelson Mandela in 1994. The reviews identified the need for direct government intervention to overcome the failure of the policy of segregation to stem the tide of black urbanisation in the 1940s, and to ameliorate the health and welfare conditions of Africans in the urban areas. They also showed that the system of capitalism neglected to remunerate African workers at a level adequate to sustain their livelihood in urban areas.
A number of detailed social development proposals consistent with a broadly social democratic impetus emerged between 1940 and 1944. They recommended a national health service under state control; the extension of state housing and welfare provision for Africans; the eradication of the pass laws, which forcibly controlled the movement of Africans; the extension of social security into a national system incorporating urban Africans; central government control of African education; and specific measures around the extension of milk provision and feeding schemes for Africans. The political circumstances of the war against fascism induced this search on the part of the Smuts government for more inclusive social policies that could relieve the poverty of urban Africans, and was led by liberal reformers in the government. The unstated ‘diswelfares’ caused by segregation and capitalism were thus not allowed to remain undealt with, but were seen by these government commissions as the responsibility of the state.
The reformist proposals emerging in South Africa were broadly comparable to the more inclusive social policy proposals in the UK in the 1940s, based on state protected social rights of citizenship that were spearheaded by the Beveridge Report. These proposals eventually led to the establishment of the welfare state following a landslide Labour Party victory in 1945. In the colonies, the strategic consequences of the ‘self-determination’ provisions of the 1941 anti-fascist Atlantic Charter were also taken up by anti-colonial radicals (United Nations 2018). For example, as early as 1942, the African-independence political activist George Padmore identified the strategic importance of the call by the Atlantic Charter to make global democratisation and extension of welfare part of the struggle against colonialism (Padmore and Cunard 1942). This position was consolidated at the 5th Pan Africanist Congress in Manchester in 1945, where the resolution of the West Indies delegation was adopted. It called for the ‘immediate introduction of all forms of modern social legislation in existence in metropolitan areas, e.g., old age pensions, family allowances, national health and unemployment insurances …’ (Padmore 1963: 60).
The anti-fascist ‘war years’ thus created a global climate for the investigation of radical social reform ideas of a social democratic character. These ideas were seized upon by intellectuals in the black opposition movements in South Africa, such as AB Xuma, a public health doctor and president general of the ANC between 1940 and 1949. The convergence on the need for fundamental social reforms in South Africa between the Xuma-led ANC and the segregationist, liberal, white ruling United Party of Smuts was made possible by the acceptance of the Atlantic Charter’s provision for post-war democratisation and the extension of social security to all nations under nazi and fascist occupation. The United Party supported this objective globally and joined the war on the Allied side in 1940, while the ANC produced a citizenship charter in 1943, African Claims, which related the Atlantic Charter to the lack of democracy and social rights for blacks in South Africa. Both groups, for very different strategic reasons, hoped the implementation of the Atlantic Charter would be beneficial for post-war South Africa.
AFRICAN CLAIMS IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1943
The impact of the international rights-based Atlantic Charter of 1941, which established the political foundations for a post-war settlement, had a major influence on South African opposition political movements. In particular, its call to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; … and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’, as well as its advocacy of inclusive social policy aimed at ‘securing, for all, improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security’ (Borgwardt 2002: 46), was applied to South Africa in the ANC’s 1943 document, African Claims in South Africa. Leaders of the ANC, such as Xuma and ZK Matthews, were already exposed to a social rights discourse through their educational activities at liberal universities and intellectual engagements with liberals and civil rights activists in the US and Britain in the 1930s. For example, following the completion of his medical studies, Xuma gave a speech entitled ‘Bridging the Gap between White and Black’, which compared the position of blacks and whites in South Africa against an American ideal, and which gave ‘hope and citizenship rights to all alike’ (in