Sixty years ago this week, delegates from all over SA met at the Congress of the People in Kliptown to finalise the Freedom Charter. Albie Sachs remembers the gathering... The worst moment produced the best moment. Scores of police, many on horseback, others armed with semi-automatic Sten guns, surrounded us and marched through the assembled gathering to the makeshift platform. One stone, one screaming attack on the arrogant police, and there could have been a massacre.Instead we stood and responded with the only weapon we had - our music. Never have the songs of freedom resonated more beautifully than when we used them to face down those guns. Activist Ida Mtwana's voice sailed through the loudspeakers. Then the final sections of the Freedom Charter were read out, adopted by acclamation, and the meeting rapidly brought to an end.Yes, this was Kliptown, on the outskirts of Soweto, June 26 1955, when the Freedom Charter was adopted.story_article_left1The immovable object of the apartheid state was confronting the irresistible force of the oppressed people. There were more than 2000 delegates. We had streamed in from communities throughout the country. Most of us had been seated on a bare plot of ground. The open-air simplicity emphasised the unvarnished nature of our demands: freedom in our lifetime! South Africa belongs to all who live in it!Tens of thousands of meetings throughout the country had presented a huge number of declarations about how we envisaged freedom. These had been collated and reduced to 10 basic principles. They would provide the foundations for a new democratic South Africa. Starting with a ringing preamble and ending with a rousing call to action, the text of the Freedom Charter was ready.The text had already emerged from umpteen drafts produced after these two years of active campaigning and consultation throughout the length and breadth of the country. Some demands had come in written on pieces of brown paper bag. From the University of Cape Town a small group of activists had sent in a neatly typed, prolix and pumped-up vision of what a new South Africa should be.I was told recently that the idea of the Freedom Charter had emerged from a discussion in New York between Professor ZK Matthews and the great African-American singer and activist, Paul Robeson. I hope this is true. Robeson was the Nelson Mandela of that age. An imposing figure with a deep bass voice, he provided dignified, humane and resonant leadership to the struggles of his people. He had also reached out to and embraced all those who were fighting racial domination throughout the world.block_quotes_start The '50s were a decade of hope and ebullience. The '60s, after Sharpeville, became a decade of repression and state terror block_quotes_endTo return to Kliptown ... We were all used to the klopjag, as police raids were called. But never on this scale. Yet they arrested nobody at the time. They simply took all our names and addresses and confiscated every single piece of paper and every banner they could find. The strategy had been to allow us to convict ourselves out of our own mouths. The state wished to cut off the heads of the whole congress movement by proving a conspiracy to overthrow apartheid and replace it with a united South Africa based on equal rights for all.The crackdown and arrests eventually came before dawn on December 5 1956. I had just passed my final-year law exam and was starting to look for chambers. The doorbell at my home rang loudly. The Special Branch officers seemed unusually jovial. Their interest was literary - a search for banned books."All these books," one of them said, "do you read them all?" After they left, my phone began to ring. "Oh, you're still there ... they arrested Brian and Fred and Alex and Lionel for treason." Treason ... that was crazy! Then I realised from something that one of the Special Branch officers had said that I had been one of 20 people on a list of spare accused who could be called upon as substitutes.story_article_right2The accused were flown to Johannesburg and locked up in the Old Fort Prison. Oliver Tambo, already there, immediately organised them into a choir, singing freedom songs right on the site where the Constitutional Court now stands. At the more trivial level, advocate Lionel Forman found a tenant for his chambers in Cape Town, advocate AL Sachs.We should have taken the Treason Trial more seriously, yet somehow we could not. Big crowds came out with posters saying "We stand by our leaders". The Indian community in Fordsburg provided food at the Old Fort. Even in racist South Africa, the idea that to demand freedom, equality and justice constituted treason, was crazy. The trial itself became the centre of popular mobilisation. The 156 men and women, black, white and brown, from all parts of the country, represented the very vision of the free and equal society projected by the Freedom Charter. Nonracialism was promoted as never before.All the banned leaders who had been prohibited from communicating with each other could now get together daily to plan the activities of the movement. The Treason Trial Defence Fund was formed. It was a registered charity, and defence counsel cheekily persuaded the three trial judges to adjourn the hearing early one day to allow the accused to stand on street corners with tin boxes collecting money for their defence.block_quotes_start The spirit of the Freedom Charter radiates strongly from the place where Tambo led the choir of imprisoned choristers block_quotes_endThe mountainous raid at Kliptown produced a mouse of evidence. Thus there was loud laughter in court when the prosecution handed in two seized documents, one reading "soup with meat", the other "soup without meat". Another moment of mirth came when Professor Andrew Murray, the chief prosecution expert on communism, identified advocacy of communism in a text read out to him, and was asked if he remembered that he himself had written it.The '50s were a decade of hope and ebullience. The '60s, after Sharpeville, became a decade of repression and state terror. The Treason Trial collapsed but the Freedom Charter survived; indeed, it flourished.I often wondered why it stood up so well. I am sure its sustainability came from the fact that it was not the product of lawyers, politicians, political scientists and other experts. It truly emanated from the involvement of literally hundreds of thousands of people at gatherings all over the country. Their demands were real and specific. Freedom was a dream, but not an abstract notion. It meant removing the multiple restrictions and indignities imposed by apartheid. But it also called for access to the basic decencies and wherewithal of life for all.story_article_left3When Tambo set up the constitutional committee of the ANC in Lusaka in the late '80s, we knew that at last we were on the verge of achieving freedom in our lifetime. A completely new constitution was in the offing. In crafting its foundational principles, we did not have to start from scratch. The vision and ideals were already set out in the Freedom Charter. All that was necessary was to transform them into an operational document for a new democratic South Africa.From time to time I revisit Freedom Square in Kliptown. Once an empty piece of land marvellously filled with people, it is now a grandiose and formal space empty of human presence. When last there, the only people I noticed were vendors selling fruit and knitted goods in the spaces between the massive columns. The one place of delight, the museum containing beautifully crafted wire figures of people who had been at the Congress of the People (including myself!) was closed to the public.The spirit of the Freedom Charter may not at present be found on the site where it was adopted. But that spirit radiates strongly from the place where Tambo led the choir of imprisoned choristers who had produced the charter. The Constitutional Court nurtures the lifelong dream of freedom, now embodied in the text of our constitution, as it firmly and painstakingly turns the sword of oppression into the ploughshare of justice.Sachs is a former justice of the Constitutional Court..