By Carilee Osborne
First published in Amandla magazine

In the year of the 100^th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, Martin Jansen’s Freedom isn’t Free: The Freedom Charter Today couldn’t be more relevant. It comes at a time when many South Africans are questioning not only the legacy of their famous founding father and the party that he represented, but also that of the transition more broadly. Despite this, Mandela is barely present in the film. Jansen chooses rather to focus on a diverse range of voices to tell the history and contemporary resonance of the Freedom Charter.

By Lenny Gentle

Adopted by the ANC and its fellow Congress Alliance partners at Kliptown in 1955 the Freedom Charter has been a rallying symbol and inspiration for many activists for decades. But it has as well been a source of divisions within the liberation movement – the PAC, for instance, split from the ANC in 1957 saying that the Freedom Charter represented the domination of white liberalism over the ANC. And at COSATU’s 1987 Congress the debate as to whether COSATU should adopt the Freedom Charter was one of the hottest and most divisive in its history – as some unions wanted to align COSATU with the ANC and others warned that what was needed was a Workers’ Charter which would focus COSATU on its goal of winning socialism.