While the re-emergence of mass democratic organisations in the 1980s has made a large contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, these organisations have tended to be urban based. One of the most significant results of the Congress of the People campaign was to transform the Congress movement of the time into a truly national movement. While the Defiance Campaign had achieved this in the towns and cities, the Congress of the People campaign made the Congress Alliance into a mass movement in the rural areas. In Wilson Fanti's words: “By going out and talking to people the volunteers just put a light in the rural areas.”

It is out of the Congress of the People campaign, conducted amongst workers on white farms, peasants on the land, migrant labourers on the mines and in industry, that the Freedom Charter demands concerning the land emerged.

To the contemporary democratic movement, many of the rural areas which previously boasted thriving ANC branches or sent delegates to the Congress of the People are unfortunately still unknown. To remedy this situation it is necessary to understand the specific problems that these people confront. Thirty years after the creation of the Charter, we believe that the demands remain substantially similar.

It is true that since 1955 many hundreds of thousands of our people have become urbanized wage labourers. It is true that many hundreds of thousands living in the bantustans have no land whatsoever and think of themselves perhaps, not as landless peasants, but as unemployed workers, or as the families of migrant workers prevented by influx control from living with their breadwinners in the towns.

For many of these people the demand for the sharing of land, for seeds and tractors to be supplied by the government may not have relevance. We would be making a grave error, however, if we underestimated the extent of land hunger still felt by many South Africans. Bantustan chiefs and government puppets continue to squeeze their own people.