Preparations for a national dialogue are in full swing. The critical questions of what the national dialogue is, who should be involved, what it should focus on, how it will be structured, what will make it truly national, and who will lead it are all under intense scrutiny. The dialogue is of the utmost importance.
South Africa's history is rich with national dialogues that have shaped its historical, political and constitutional development. From the 1909 National Convention to the 1912 Conference of Natives and the 1913 Afrikaner conversation, these dialogues have been a continuous thread in the fabric of South Africa's evolution.
As institutions such as the Boerderbond of 1918 and other think-tanks were established, an institutional Right was being consolidated. The Native Congress was consigned, structurally, to occupy the then empty institutional Left, despite it being a construct of landowners, businesspeople, a cognitive elite, and kings and chiefs: all of whom would constitute an institutional Right had it not been for race as a vector of South African political evolutions.
The 1920s marked a significant turning point with the pathfinding dialogue that led to the transformative 1923 African Bill of Rights adopted at the ANC national conference. This decisive moment not only set the course for a human rights-based society but became the lodestar for the constitution of a modern-day South Africa. The adoption of a universal franchise, nonracialism, non-sexism and the cardinal human freedoms of speech, press, assembly and conscience, along with property rights, became the cornerstone of South Africa's constitutional and political development.
This inspiring transformation set its non-negotiable standard as democracy, inspiring us to uphold these values in our present and future.
The demand by natives for inclusion in the 1909 convention settlement took on a human rights character, a condition that challenged the “net blankes” redefinitions of “the national”. The exclusion of humans of African origin in any political settlement has as its roots an element of crimes against humanity.
The crises of poverty, unemployment, and inequality, which were then a race-blind phenomenon, intensified the black-and-white divide through competition for decent jobs. The Great Depression of 1929 and its aftermath galvanised, through election pacts and coalitions, one of the most highly charged racial civil society movements. The institutionalisation of cheap black labour and the mischaracterisation of poverty among white South Africans as “a poor white problem” sharpened race into a vector in the definition of interests as the currency of politics.
The 1948 victory of a DF Malan-led National Party, a racial oligarchy legitimised by a whites-only franchise, grew into South Africa’s apex political liability, still dominating the worldview of many we consider to be the leaders of sections of our society. The outcomes of the conversations leading up to the 1948 victory would be institutionalised through state-funded commissions of inquiry that theorised the basis of the grand apartheid legislation passed between 1948 and 1960.
The diversity of South Africans would be manipulated by law to create a segregated spatial geography, which manifested itself in skills development, infrastructure investment, land ownership, economic citizenship, and the welfarist character of the state. This has crippled the conceptual reach of diversity to represent what apartheid meant to the majority of South Africans.
The 1955 Congress of the People, if the historical accounts of its organisation are accurate, is the only representative national dialoguing process whose legitimacy has stood the test of time
After the 1923 Bill of Rights, ANC-led national dialogues emerged as a coalition advocating freedom as a human right. These dialogues produced the 1943 African Claims document, which outlined the future envisioned by the ANC, which was now not only a liberation movement but a de facto think-tank led by Africans and charting an alternative way forward. Mischaracterised as a response to the 1948 apartheid victory, the build-up to the 1949 congress produced the “freedom in our lifetime” programme of action.
One of the programme's critical outcomes was the decision to create what is now known as the Freedom Charter. The charter was a decisive statement on who has the legitimate authority to govern a South Africa belonging to all who live in it. Undoubtedly, the 1955 Congress of the People, if the historical accounts of its organisation are accurate, is the only representative national dialoguing process whose legitimacy has stood the test of time and, notwithstanding its elite character, marked the beginning of a movement that would ultimately lead to the end of apartheid. What remains of apartheid is that it is a global crime against humanity wherever it appears.
Subsequent national dialogues were, in more ways than one, about the practical implementation of the Freedom Charter. None of these dialogues, including those within the complexes opposed to the essence of the charter, have challenged its normative fortitude. The constitution of 1996 is the legal embodiment of the Freedom Charter, existing within the philosophical universe of what we proudly call the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.
As we journey towards a new national dialogue, the organisers must remember the essence of past dialogues and incorporate the outstanding elements into the current framework.
The 2024 elections have confirmed who has a legally proven mandate to represent those who gave the mandate. Equally, the voter turnout demonstrated that those with the election outcome numbers are not the absolute representatives of all of us as “we the people”. This complexity and its convergence with the multiethnic, multiracial, multiclass, and multi-geopolitical interests in South Africa will complicate how national the national dialogue should be.
The broadly accepted criteria of letting the foundations of former presidents and icons lead the dialogue have been liquidated since the outcome of the elections by a potential trust deficit of leaders with proven support, given the brazen antagonisms that were at play leading up to May 2024. The conversations about conversations, similar to the pre-1994 democratic breakthrough, might have spun preconditions to participate, the stubbornness to capitulate therefrom becoming political capital for the upcoming and influential local government elections.
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