The seeds of confusion in South Africa (Azania) were planted in 1955 with the adoption of the Freedom Charter by Nelson Mandela’s group abandoning the 1949 Programme of Action. This Freedom Charter was incorporated into the ANC’s new constitution in 1957. The preamble of this country’s constitution was copied from this Freedom Charter. That group was hitherto referred to as “The Charterists” and those who broke away and formed the Pan Africanist Congress led by Robert Sobukwe are known as the Africanists.

The concerted effort by members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) to direct and control the African people’s struggle for liberation dates back to the 1920’s. This was indirect conflict to the 1928 Resolution on “The South African Question’ adopted by the Executive Committee of the Communist International following the Sixth Comintern congress transcribed by Dominic Tweedie. This resolution called for, among other things, the establishment of an independent native South African republic. It further reads: South Africa is a black country, the majority of its population is black and so is the majority of the workers and peasants.

The bulk of the South African population is the black peasantry, whose land has been expropriated by the white minority. Seven eighths of the land is owned by whites. Hence the national question in South Africa, which is based upon the agrarian question, lies at the foundation of the revolution in South Africa. The black peasantry constitutes the basic moving force of the revolution in alliance with and under the leadership of the working class.

On the leadership of the working class, this issue is debatable because the African people in South Africa were not oppressed as a class but as a nation. However, the gist of the resolution sensitizes white members of the Communist Party of South Africa to the reality of the situation in South Africa which they ignored and continued to want to place African people or natives under their tutelage and guardianship.

In 1945 the founding President of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), Anton Lembede, received a letter from Ruth First, Joe Slovo’s wife inviting the ANCYL to join the Communist Party Youth league which invitation Lembede rejected with the contempt it deserved. In 1947 the ANCYL was struck by the tragedy of the sudden death of Lembede. In 1949, the ANCYL adopted the Programme of Action which the CPSA was vehemently opposed to and made sure they undermined and supplanted it with a sellout document in 1955 known as the Freedom Charter. The Africanists in the ANC wanted to know the origin and author of this preposterous document but never got the answers. In Young Mandela published around 2010, David James Smith reveals the author of the Freedom Charter as a white man, Rusty Bernstein, who was a member of both the Communist Party and Congress of Democrats.

Why is the native South African still economically handicapped in spite of the country being independent? To answer that question, we should go back to the secret negotiations that Mandela and the ANC clinched with the white colonial minority government and its imperialist backers starting in 1981 according to Mandela in his book Long Walk To Freedom and in the mid-1980’s on the part of some ANC members according to John Pilger’s book Freedom Next Time in a chapter titled Apartheid Did Not Die published in 2008.

The first people to raise their objections to the secret negotiations the ANC held with representatives of the white minority government were those in the PAC led by its second President the late Zeph Mothopeng who also rejected a contrived meeting with Mandela in Harare orchestrated by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. READ MORE...>

The African Executive
By Sam Ditshego
The writer is a fellow at the Pan Africanist Research Institute.
http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=8830&magazine=592