Nelson Mandela was there. Walter Sisulu was there. Helen Joseph was there. Father Trevor Huddleston was there. So were 3 000 ordinary citizens, demanding a better life for all under a new, non-discriminatory dispensation.
On Saturday, 26 June, 1955 people from around the country gathered on a dusty soccer field in the middle of Kliptown to approve the Freedom Charter, in an atmosphere described by Mandela in his Long Walk to Freedom as "serious and festive".
Professor ZK Matthews, the African National Congress (ANC) Cape president, on returning in 1954 from a year as visiting professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary, proposed the idea of the Freedom Charter.
He said, "I wonder whether the time has not come for the African National Congress to consider the question of convening a national convention, a congress of the people, representing all the people of this country irrespective of race or colour, to draw up a Freedom Charter for the democratic South Africa of the future."
Pamphlets were printed and distributed around the country, urging people to submit their ideas for "the good life that they seek for themselves and their children", for the charter. The pamphlet said the charter would be a guide to "those singing tomorrows" when South Africans would live and work together in peace and harmony.
All the struggle organisations, including the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People's Organisation, the Congress of Democrats, and the ANC, joined to form the Congress of the People (COP), the body that wrote the charter and presented it to the people.
Writing the charter
There are several interpretations of how the charter was written. Mandela says the ANC branches contributed greatly to the writing of the charter, particularly those in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, where the "two best drafts" were produced.
But the charter was finally drafted by "a small committee of the National Action Council and reviewed by the ANC's National Executive".
Lionel "Rusty" Bernstein, a Congress of Democrats and Communist Party member, who was banned at the time, gives a different version in his work, Memory Against Forgetting.
He says "a national 'call', explaining the concept of the COP and asking people everywhere to collaborate in setting the terms of the Freedom Charter", was produced.
The slogan coming out of this call was, "Let us speak of freedom!" This became the keynote of the campaign. From thousands of meetings around the country, suggestions started arriving, often just one liners, says Bernstein.
Others were unwieldy summaries of what conspired at a particular meeting, written "on scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, pages torn from school exercise books, and often [on] the backs of our own handbills".
Bernstein says all the bits of paper were "stuffed away together in an old cabin trunk" while COP members got on with the business of organising the logistics of the meeting.
The issue of where the meeting was to be held loomed large. Most large places, whether indoor or outdoor, were limited to a particular race group in terms of the Group Areas Act, or were controlled by white local authorities.
Only one place emerged as being accessible and available - a dusty soccer field owned by an Indian, a "piece of wasteland, a few acres of red dust, scattered tufts of scrub grass, khaki-weed and 'blackjacks'".
But Bernstein had more urgent concerns - to turn the "thousands of bits of paper into a draft Freedom Charter". There was no precedent or plan, and the "Working Committee decided that it was 'just a writing job', and handed it on to me".
So, with a team of volunteers, the bits of paper were sorted into topics, covering eventually an entire living-room floor, with labels like labour, land, civil rights, education and living standards.
It was a difficult task. Some demands were just "expressions of desire": "freedom and equality", "justice for all", "no more racialism"; while others were sighs of resistance: "we're not moving" or "life too heavy".
The process dragged on. "The volunteers took it as far as they could, admitted defeat and went home. I stayed on and went through them all again to get the general flavour, and then stuffed them all back into the trunk to be kept for reference." The trunk subsequently disappeared, never to be found again.
Bernstein says he started to outline a skeleton charter but soon abandoned it, realising that "it was quite irrelevant how many pieces could be fitted in". Instead he began to discern the general categories of demands, and created a "workable skeleton".
"Along that blundering unmapped route, an outline of the charter began to emerge," he writes.
He ran the draft document past several trusted colleagues, a few changes were made, and it was given to the COP working committee.
"They, in turn, approved it without alteration. It was ready for the COP only days before the great event itself."
