Re-reading pamphlets that have survived from the Congress of the People campaign, we are struck by the practical down-to-earth details. “How are delegates to be chosen?” asks a 1955 leaflet (“Let us speak of freedom”). “By a vote of the people who come together in a meeting in a house, or in a hall in a village, where they can talk over and agree on what they want in the Freedom Charter…”. “Who is to pay for the food and travelling?”, the pamphlet continues. “Those who elect the delegate must pay for his travelling, and give him five shillings for his food. If they are willing to speak of freedom they must be willing to collect money to help win it. Those who can, should collect food, mealies, potatoes, rice, for the delegate to take to the Congress of the People Delegates’ Kitchen at the Congress.”

As we celebrate fifty years of the Freedom Charter, we may be inclined simply to honour a text of inspiring demands and moving language (which it certainly is); or reduce the Charter into a litany of clauses to be dutifully recited on official occasions. We believe that the story of the Freedom Charter is much more. It is also the story of mealies, potatoes and rice, of the delegates’ kitchen, and of the blanket that each participant was advised to bring along.

When our book was first published in 1986 as 30 Years of the Freedom Charter, the conditions under which we wrote were very different from those now prevailing. Both of us were underground during the first state of emergency of the 1980s, one of us was arrested as the book appeared, the other had to go underground again and subsequently disappear out of the country for some years.

But the period in which we wrote was different in another sense, and this had an impact on the nature of the book we produced. Through the intensified repression of the 1960s, the apartheid regime had succeeded in marginalising the Congress movement (that is, the organisations allied to the African National Congress – ANC) and suppressing any public manifestation of its traditions within the country. The arrest of the top leadership of the ANC and its allies did not completely eradicate the organisation's presence, but the liberation movement could conduct no legal activity until its unbanning in 1990.