Sustaining Life. Theodore Powers
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Station attendee and ANC member Z. K. Matthews played a central role in compiling the charter.56
The National Party met this opposition to apartheid rule with violent repression. The year following the Congress of the People, the meeting at which the Freedom Charter had been drafted and adopted, the National Party arrested 156 meeting attendees on treason charges. While the case failed to secure a single conviction, the Treason Trials showed how apartheid security forces actively undermined the anti-apartheid movement via surveillance and prosecution. Presaging subsequent events, security forces opened fire and killed fourteen protesters at one protest in the mining town of Kimberley in November 1952. The apartheid security forces responded aggressively to the Defiance Campaign, using deadly force, and the period of open defiance toward the apartheid state came to a halt with the Sharpeville Massacre. On March 21, 1960, at a protest against the pass laws organized by the Pan-Africanist Congress, sixty-nine men, women, and children were shot and killed by state security forces. Within South Africa, the National Party responded by further repressing political activity. The ANC, Pan-Africanist Congress, SACP, and other organizations tied to the anti-apartheid movement were banned, and their members went into hiding. Internationally, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the killing of nonviolent protesters by apartheid security forces and calling for an end to apartheid. The Sharpeville Massacre was a turning point in the mass movement against the apartheid state, one that led to the militarization of political struggle in South Africa.
The Sharpeville Massacre and subsequent militarization of the apartheid state transformed the organizational composition of the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC moved its leadership into exile and formed its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (meaning “spear of the nation” and abbreviated as MK), to engage in guerilla warfare against the apartheid government. Nelson Mandela was a founding member of MK and led a campaign to pressure the National Party to negotiate a new constitution. The campaign targeted government installations across South Africa and included a series of bombings over an eighteen-month period between 1961 and 1963. MK leaders were captured by state security services and prosecuted for “violent acts of revolution” in what became known as the Rivonia Trials (1963–1964). ANC and SACP leaders including Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and Walter Sisulu were sentenced to life in prison for their involvement in the MK attacks. The intensification of internal repression against the anti-apartheid movement shifted the military conflict from a domestic to a regional affair, with the ANC in exile serving as the apartheid state’s primary target.
During the 1970s, the apartheid state shifted from racially “ordering” South African society to becoming a regional military and intelligence apparatus. However, the expansion of apartheid state violence across Southern Africa led to international isolation. In 1961, the National Party held a referendum, and white South Africans voted to withdraw from the British Commonwealth.57 South Africa’s exit from the British Commonwealth also entailed a transformation of Botswana’s political status. Formerly the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana had been subsumed into the Union of South Africa as part of the political compromise leading to unified white rule. South Africa’s exit from the British Commonwealth foreclosed the possibility of Botswana’s incorporation into South Africa, and following the development of a constitution in 1961 the British approved an application for self-government in Botswana. While South Africa maintained political control over South-West Africa (today known as Namibia), Botswana emerged as an important “frontline state” in the militarized campaign against apartheid along with Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, and Angola. Given Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban support for African anticolonial movements, the regional conflict against the anti-apartheid movement was framed through a Cold War lens. While powerful international partners such as the United States became allies of the apartheid state, new variants of political struggle emerged within South Africa that challenged the racial logic and state violence of the apartheid era.
Black Consciousness, the Soweto Uprising, and Late Apartheid
The intensification of state repression following the Sharpeville Massacre led to an interregnum for ANC-led internal opposition to apartheid, but it was followed by a new form of social justice activism in South Africa. The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) traced its roots to the South African student movement and aimed to transform black South African social life. Growing out of transnational movements for black liberation and Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary thought, the BCM worked to undermine the discourse of white supremacy and set the foundations for the Soweto Uprising, which would take place in 1976. As the National Party turned state security forces on black South African urban youth with deadly effect, the foundations for another wave of broad-based opposition to apartheid began to form. Despite attempts by the National Party to control the townships, forms of self-governance and resistance reemerged within black urban social formations. Marked by nonracial solidarity that connected urban civics associations, a rising trade union movement, the student movement, and human rights activists, the Mass Democrat Movement set into motion dynamics that would lead to the end of apartheid.
The National Party’s attacks on the anti-apartheid movement did not quell black South African resistance for long. As the ANC and other organizations were banned and their leadership forced into exile, the South African student movement led the resurgence in anti-apartheid activism. Up until the late 1960s, the nonracialist position established via the Freedom Charter held sway in a student movement led by the National Union of South African Students. However, debates on the efficacy and suitability of white liberal solidarity in the face of apartheid violence led to a fracture within the student movement. Inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon, student activists including Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, and Mamphela Ramphele argued that colonization and white settler violence were predicated on the rationale of white supremacy, which led black South Africans to internalize a sense of inferiority. For Biko and others, continued alliance with white liberal students would not address the need for an autonomous student movement that united those who had been historically disenfranchised. Critically, the conception of “black” that was developed by the student movement at the time included all who were discriminated against by the apartheid state: black, “coloured,” and Indian South Africans. The South African Student Organization was formed in 1968 based on the logic of autonomous black self-organization and precipitated the rise of the BCM.
Emerging from the student movement, Black Consciousness activists subsequently shifted their focus away from university campuses and toward black South African communities. Early BCM history overlapped with the South African Student Organization in Durban, where both Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele were undertaking their medical studies.58 Biko was expelled from the university in 1972 due to his political activities, while Ramphele completed her medical degree that year. Biko was to live under further restriction, as the apartheid security forces limited his movement to King William’s Town, a small city located outside of East London in what is today South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. There, Ramphele initiated a community health center that provided primary care and health education to black South Africans. The Zanempilo Community Health Centre was founded as part of a broader BCM campaign to provide medical care to underserved black South African communities.59 Ramphele was named regional director of Black Community Programs for the province, directing BCM programs with Biko, who remained under state surveillance.
In addition to providing primary care, BCM activists led campaigns to organize communities and developed literature that challenged white supremacy. The Black People’s Convention, founded in 1973, served as the umbrella under which activities and campaigns across the country were coordinated. Publications such as Black Review aimed to promote self-respect, self-reliance, and human dignity among black South Africans. BCM activists also educated and mobilized high school students, leading to the establishment of the South African Students Movement in 1972. Students who attended leadership workshops coordinated by BCM activists played a central role in forming the Soweto Students Representative Council and in envisioning and planning the protests against Bantu education that became known as the Soweto Uprising (Ramphele 2016).
On June 16, 1976, students from across Soweto stood up from their desks, left their classrooms, and began marching toward Orlando West Stadium. Approximately twenty thousand students took to the streets of Soweto to protest the Afrikaans Medium Decree (1974), which required