Rusty Bernstein

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the history behind the signing of the Freedom Charter. The article was first published on the City of Joburg's website on the 24 June 2005. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

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.

It was on Saturday, 26 June, 1955, that 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 Nelson Mandela in his Long Walk to Freedom as “serious and festive”.

Scenes from the Congress of the People (via Restorica)

It was professor ZK Matthews, the African National Congress (ANC) Cape president, who, 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...

The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.

When I talk to 76 year-old Clive Chipkin in his Parkview studio, he tells me that the book was probably in him from the beginning, from as far back as University days, although he doesn’t know whether he intended to write it at that stage of his life. Almost in the same breath he tells me that he’s just returned from a first time visit to Israel where, against expectations, he liked it; particularly the modern, thirties architecture of Tel Aviv and Haifa. Slender, energetic Chipkin, is still designing, still traveling far afield for his work, still recording and relating the stories of Joburg’s always changing, architectural and social structures. His mind is as lively as a sack full of grasshoppers, as dripping with memory as a honeycomb. He’s an idealist, a gossip, intrigued as much by people as by facades and building fashions, perhaps more so. He loves associating buildings and spaces with their creators and linking the creators with their times. I think I might label him a pragmatic intellectual, or an intellectual pragmatist perhaps? 

He claims that he came to Wits in 1947, not knowing much about architecture. He thought it had more to do with town planning; more of a social discipline. In high school, when...