Editor’s Note
Radio Freedom, which was launched in 1963, heightened the fight for liberations as part of the propaganda machinery of the liberation movement and instilled hope that one day a united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous society which respects human dignity and rights would be created.
It offered an alternative perspective of the socio-political landscape. At the time, radio stations were used by the apartheid regime to peddle disinformation and propaganda, in a quest to distort the ideas of freedom.
The relaunch of the Jozi Cadre is inspired by Radio Freedom, as a source of information on the ANC, shaping political education and understanding of developments as well as influencing political activities inside the country. This is all part of the quest to reconnect with communities and influence political mobilization.
South Africa has made significant progress in transforming from an apartheid state into a democratic one, but more is yet to be done to realize the envisioned National Democratic Revolution.
Our first issue commemorates the 65th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter, which was drafted through a popular process that engaged ordinary masses of South Africa, in a quest to produce a framework of what the new South Africa would look like once freedom was attained.
The Congress of the people which ultimately put the thousands of demands together to produce the popular Freedom Charter was not an isolated episode in the history of struggle, and it did not produce a document that was to be put aside, in the period prior to the achievement of freedom. The Charter summarized the popular grievances of the black majority, particularly Africans, who had suffered extensively at the hands of the inhuman system of apartheid. It was a compilation of the demands that brought together all the episodes of the struggle, since the first resistance to colonial invasion.
The Charter remains a comprehensive anti-colonial and anti-imperialist programme for social revolution. In every way, the charter was a negation of everything that apartheid was, a program that sought the most fundamental transformation of our society, taking forward the anti-colonial resistance struggles fought centuries prior.
We have an imminent task to take government to the people, within the framework of the ANC’s ideologically driven paradigm that is biased towards the working class, and to continue to defend the democratic gains of the people and to advance towards a society in which the government is a true embodiment of the people’s interests.