One of the goals of apartheid policy has been to divert African political aspirations away from the key political institutions of the South African state and into the bantustans. With a view to denying that Africans have any moral or legal right to a political voice in their own country, recent refinements of this policy strip African people of their South African citizenship.

Against such attempts of the apartheid state to define the African people as non-South Africans, to separate, black from white and to divide blacks amongst themselves, the Charter declares that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white … .”

What this means is that those who support the Charter seek no revenge against whites, that they seek a democratic South Africa where all can realize their aspirations.

Yet it is this very clause that evokes continued opposition from the supporters of black consciousness, who echo the opposition of the Africanists of the fifties. “To whom does Africa belong … ? it has been asked.

“Do stolen goods belong to a thief and not to their owner?”

“It is an historical fallacy to say South Africa belongs to everybody: both oppressor and oppressed, robber and robbed. Azania is not a prostitute that belongs to everybody all the time … “

It is true that the indigenous Khoisan and African people were violently dispossessed of their land over the two and a half centuries prior to Union, and that the Union of South Africa was founded amongst other things on this robbery.

Yet it is wrong to imply that the stolen land was appropriated by all whites. This is part of a wider tendency in some black consciousness thinking, to suggest that all whites are exploiters, and all blacks members of the working class. One does not therefore cooperate politically with any white, for that would be an alliance with one's slave-master.