‘We are the progressives’ : Alexandra Youth Congress activists and the freedom charter, 1983–85

Abstract

This paper looks at the rise of a youth congress in Alexandra township, South Africa, in the mid‐1980s. The formation of Alexandra Youth Congress involved creating a formal organisational structure which embodied a legalistic and constitutional ethos, central to which was the adoption of the Freedom Charter as a key organisational tenet. Much of the appeal of the Freedom Charter lay in the range of ‘answers’ to organisational concerns that it offered youth activists: the Charter provided a symbolic, and for some a real, link to African National Congress: in the context of Alexandra's metropolitan setting, embracing the Freedom Charter and the United Democratic Front meant in the most practical sense easy access to other political activists, who in turn provided organisational resources and a sense of solidarity: and the document became in the hands of some youth activists a creed for the purposes of recruitment and political conscientisation.