BY STEVE CLARK  
The land shall be shared among those who work it.

That is the title of one section of the Freedom Charter, the platform of the South African freedom struggle adopted in 1955 by 3,000 delegates to the Congress of the People.

The Freedom Charter is today the program of the national, democratic revolution to overthrow the apartheid state and tear apart the system of white supremacy in South Africa. That revolution will make possible, for the first time, the forging of a nonracial South African nation-state with full rights for all its inhabitants—the 28 million people who comprise the Black majority, as well as all those among the 5 million whites who are willing to live and work as equals….

This lack of information is particularly gaping with regard to the struggle for equal land rights. Even those individuals who are acquainted with the truth about the apartheid system often know little about the conditions in those sections of the oppressed Black population consigned to miserable poverty in the rural Bantustans or about those being driven in growing numbers from the land they till in the 87 percent of South African territory reserved for “whites only.”

This pamphlet is aimed at helping to fill this gap. It is based on two articles that appeared in the December 16 and December 30, 1985, issues of Intercontinental Press, a biweekly international newsmagazine published in New York.

By telling the story of the forced dispossession of Africans of the soil and the struggle against this massive land theft, the pamphlet also explains a great deal about the origins of the apartheid system, its current policies, and the revolutionary movement to overthrow it….

The centrality of the struggle for access to the land in the South African revolution is a major theme of a report by Jack Barnes adopted by the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party in August 1985. That report was published under the title “The Coming Revolution in South Africa” in the Fall 1985 issue of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory. Africans have been dispossessed of their land and forcibly denied the right to farm, the report explains. These are preconditions for the maintenance of the entire structure of racist subjugation under apartheid.

The South African revolution, Barnes says, “is a revolution to conquer the right of the Black majority to own, work, and develop the land from which they have been expelled by the apartheid regime. To win the right of Africans to become free farmers, producing cash crops for an expanding home market. To carry out a real Homestead Act, opening the land to those who want to work it.”

Barnes explains that the opponents of the racist apartheid system “get a false picture of South Africa unless we understand the economic and social consequences of [the] forcible denial of Africans’ right to own and till the land. If we think of South Africa just in terms of its industry and mines, of what we know about the cities and the white farmers in the countryside, we get a false picture. We see only the South Africa of the white state, of the white minority. We don’t see the South African nation-state that has not yet been born….

“Opening the land,” the report emphasizes, “is inseparable from resolving the national question” in South Africa. “Neither can be accomplished without the destruction of the apartheid state structure, which blocks the road to development of the South African nation-state.” These tasks can only be carried through to completion by a broad revolutionary democratic movement under the leadership of an alliance of the exploited producers—the urban working class, the agricultural wage workers, and the peasants in the Bantustans and in the countryside of “white” South Africa. The toilers from the oppressed Black majority are the vanguard force in this revolutionary alliance.  
 
 
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