Freedom Charter Kliptown: The Congress of the People and South Africa’s Constitutional Imagination

On a winter weekend in June 1955, nearly 3,000 delegates gathered on an open patch of ground in Kliptown, on the south-western edge of Johannesburg. They came from across South Africa to adopt a document built from thousands of demands sent in by ordinary people. It began with a sentence that was radical at the time and still carries weight today: South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. The Freedom Charter, adopted at Kliptown, became the founding statement of the movement against apartheid, and its language would echo four decades later in South Africa’s Constitution. On Day 18 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group’s half-day in Soweto begins at Kliptown.

A call to speak together of freedom

The idea came from Z. K. Matthews, a respected academic and leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in the Cape. In August 1953 he proposed a national convention at which all groups in South Africa might be represented, to draw up a blueprint for a free and democratic country. The ANC adopted the idea, and in March 1954, at a meeting in Tongaat, it joined with the South African Indian Congress, the Congress of Democrats, a white organisation, and the newly formed Coloured People’s Congress to set up a National Action Council to organise it. The South African Congress of Trade Unions, founded in 1955, joined the alliance soon after. Together they became known as the Congress Alliance.

What made the Congress of the People unusual was how its demands were gathered. Rather than drafting a programme in a committee room, the organisers sent out a call to the country, inviting people to “speak together of freedom”, and a large force of Freedom Volunteers collected people’s demands for the kind of country they wanted. Many were written on scraps of paper. The historian Raymond Suttner has argued that the Congress was therefore not a single event but the culmination of a long campaign of local meetings.

Who wrote the Freedom Charter?

Many hands. The bulk of the drafting fell to Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, a member of the Congress of Democrats, who later described turning thousands of bits of paper into a single text. Ruth First is said to have helped sort the demands, and Beata Lipman wrote out the original by hand. The leaders of the movement, including the ANC president, Chief Albert Luthuli, and Z. K. Matthews himself, did not see the final draft before it was presented at Kliptown. The Charter was, in that sense, both a collective document and a carefully shaped one.

The Congress of the People, 25–26 June 1955

The Congress met over the weekend of 25 and 26 June 1955, on an open square in Kliptown, then a mixed settlement on the edge of Johannesburg. Sources give figures of between about 2,800 and 3,000 delegates, among them several hundred Indian, Coloured and white delegates alongside the African majority. The clauses of the Charter were read out to the gathering and adopted.

The Congress also honoured three leaders with the ANC’s highest award, Isitwalandwe: Chief Albert Luthuli, Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Father Trevor Huddleston. Only Huddleston could accept in person; the other two were under banning orders that prevented them from attending. Nelson Mandela, also banned, watched from the edge of the crowd.

On the afternoon of the second day, armed police moved in. They took over the platform, announced that they had reason to believe treason was being contemplated, searched the delegates, took names and addresses and seized documents. According to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, even the signs from the catering tables, reading “Soup with meat” and “Soup without meat”, were later produced as evidence. The Congress completed its business, and the Charter was adopted.

What does the Freedom Charter say?

After a preamble declaring that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people, the Charter sets out ten clauses. Their headings summarise the whole document:

The People Shall Govern! All National Groups Shall Have Equal Rights! The People Shall Share in the Country’s Wealth! The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It! All Shall Be Equal Before the Law! All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights! There Shall Be Work and Security! The Doors of Learning and of Culture Shall Be Opened! There Shall Be Houses, Security and Comfort! There Shall Be Peace and Friendship!

The language is plain and direct, written to be read aloud. Some clauses set out political rights, such as the vote and equality before the law; others describe a fairer share of land, wealth, work, housing and education. That combination of civil rights with social and economic ones is a large part of why the Charter has remained so influential, and so argued over.

Treason, division and banning

The government’s answer came the following year. On 5 December 1956, police arrested 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance across the country and charged them with high treason. Many were held at the Old Fort in Johannesburg, now part of Constitution Hill. The prosecution argued that the Charter’s demands were revolutionary and could only be achieved by violence. The Treason Trial dragged on for more than four years; charges against many were dropped, and on 29 March 1961 the remaining 30 accused were all acquitted.

The Charter also divided the movement. When the ANC formally adopted it in 1956, a minority within the organisation, the Africanists, objected to its declaration that the country belonged to all who lived in it and to the multiracial alliance behind it, and some saw it as a betrayal of the struggle. In April 1959 they broke away to form the Pan Africanist Congress under Robert Sobukwe. After the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960, both the ANC and the PAC were banned, and the movement was driven underground and into exile.

From Kliptown to the Constitution

When South Africa wrote a new Constitution after apartheid, many saw the Charter in it. The preamble of the 1996 Constitution declares that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity, and the Bill of Rights includes social and economic rights, such as rights to housing, health care and education, alongside civil and political ones. At Kliptown on the Charter’s fiftieth anniversary in 2005, President Thabo Mbeki said that its vision had found expression in the national Constitution. The Constitutional Court’s own account of its history is more cautious, describing the Charter as one of the documents that carried forward the idea of a bill of rights.

The economic clauses have had a more contested afterlife. In January 1990, shortly before his release, Nelson Mandela stated that nationalising the mines, banks and monopoly industries remained ANC policy. After 1994, the ANC government did not follow that course, and the question returned to political debate from time to time, as in 2010, when the ANC Youth League pressed for mine nationalisation and senior figures in the party and government distanced themselves from it. How to interpret the Charter’s promise that the people shall share in the country’s wealth remains a live argument in South African politics.

Kliptown and Walter Sisulu Square

Kliptown, laid out in the 1890s, is one of the oldest settlements in what became Soweto, and was long a mixed community. For the Charter’s fiftieth anniversary, the site of the 1955 Congress was redeveloped as the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, named after the ANC leader. Designed by the architects StudioMAS, it was opened on 26 June 2005 by President Mbeki, who lit a flame of freedom there. The square includes a conical brick tower, the Freedom Charter Monument, with the Charter’s principles engraved in bronze, and ten columns representing its ten clauses. It is a national heritage site, and in 2024 it was inscribed by UNESCO as one of 14 sites making up the World Heritage listing Human Rights, Liberation and Reconciliation: Nelson Mandela Legacy Sites.

The square has struggled since. In May 2025, a news report by EWN described the flame as extinguished and parts of the surrounding business complex as unroofed and without services, with tourism much reduced after the pandemic and the unrest of 2021; the City of Johannesburg’s property company said it was appointing a team to plan the square’s regeneration. Kliptown itself remains a poor community, with many people living in informal housing. The contrast between the promises of 1955 and the conditions around the square today is part of what makes the visit thought-provoking.

The rest of the Soweto morning

Soweto, a name formed from South Western Townships, is today part of the City of Johannesburg, and was home to around 1.3 million people at the 2011 census. From Kliptown, the half-day tour continues to Vilakazi Street in Orlando West. Here stands the small house where Nelson Mandela lived from 1946 until 1962, which he gave to a heritage trust in 1997 and which is now a museum; the group stops for a photograph. A short walk up the same street is the house of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died in December 2021. Vilakazi Street is often described as the only street in the world to have been home to two winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The tour ends at the Hector Pieterson Memorial. On 16 June 1976, police opened fire on students in Soweto who were marching against the forced use of Afrikaans in their schools. Hector Pieterson, aged 12, was killed that day, and Sam Nzima’s photograph of him being carried by a fellow student, with his sister running alongside, was published around the world. The memorial and the museum beside it, opened in 2002, tell the story of that day. Our guide to Soweto for travellers covers the township in more depth.

Is it safe to visit Kliptown, and how much walking is involved?

The visit is made with a local guide as part of a group, and your Tour Leader will decide how long to spend at each stop depending on conditions on the day; recent reports of the square’s decline mean the Kliptown stop may be brief. Walking is light: short distances on paved ground at Walter Sisulu Square, along Vilakazi Street and around the Hector Pieterson Memorial, with some uneven pavements. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of activity a day and walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

The Freedom Charter on the Southern Africa route

Kliptown is the last major visit of the tour, and it completes a thread that runs through the Johannesburg days. On Day 7, Constitution Hill shows the prison where many of the Treason Trialists were held, beside the court that now protects the rights the Charter called for. On Day 8, the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria tells a very different story of the nation, completed in 1949, a year after the National Party came to power. For more on the city itself, see our introduction to Johannesburg, and our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey shows how all of these places fit together. The tour ends after breakfast on Day 19.

Standing in Kliptown, it is worth reading the Charter’s headings slowly. Some describe things South Africa has since achieved, such as the vote and equality before the law; others describe promises still being argued over. That is perhaps the best way to understand the Freedom Charter: not as a closed chapter of history, but as a document that South Africans still hold their country up against.