Sustaining Life. Theodore Powers
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which circulated widely and became an inspiration for social movements globally. The violence spread through Soweto, leading to the deaths of many black South African students (estimates range from 176 to 700). The Soweto Uprising and its violent repression led to a fundamental shift in South African society. Student protests spread across the country after the uprising. Internationally, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that condemned South Africa for the killings, characterized apartheid as a crime against humanity, and called for self-determination.
As a new generation of mobilized youth took the anti-apartheid movement forward, Biko remained under state surveillance in the Eastern Cape. After he was arrested at a security checkpoint outside Port Elizabeth, Biko was detained, transported to Pretoria, interrogated, and beaten to death. He died from a brain hemorrhage while in police custody. Following on the use of deadly force against black Sowetan youth, Biko’s death reinforced that the National Party would exercise lethal violence to maintain power. International condemnation rained down on the National Party but with little substantive effect. More significantly, the late 1970s marked the beginning of intermittent states of emergency as black South Africans living in townships rejected the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. The townships, the source of social mobilization to end apartheid in the 1950s, once again emerged as the core of opposition to apartheid state violence. A trade union movement that had begun its rise with a series of strikes in the early 1970s joined the movement, and solidarity actions by white South African organizations oriented around democratic and human rights principles also increased.
Over the course of the late 1970s, an increasingly hardline National Party leadership group oversaw the militarization of the apartheid state.60 Responding to growing social unrest unleashed by the Soweto Uprising, the state centralized its security apparatus through the creation of the National Security Management System in 1979. The State Security Council also usurped many functions previously overseen by the cabinet, underscoring the military’s growing power within the apartheid state (O’Malley 2007). The state’s militarization culminated with the declarations of multiple states of emergency during the 1980s as the anti-apartheid movement attempted to make the country “ungovernable” through mass stay-away campaigns, rent boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations. Various forms of state violence were enacted against anti-apartheid activists, including torture and death. The surge in state violence within South Africa was mirrored by increasingly aggressive attempts to eliminate ANC leaders in exile. Ruth First’s assassination in Mozambique in 1982 is one example of the apartheid state’s violent impact on other Southern African societies.
The increased aggression of the apartheid state led to fundamental changes in the exiled ANC’s leadership structure and political principles. During the 1970s, the intelligence services of the militarized apartheid state penetrated the ANC exile structures at the highest levels. The infiltration of the ANC forced the party to adapt its mechanisms for internal governance. Already noted for its strong organizational hierarchy, the ANC became increasingly centralized during late apartheid. An example of the ANC’s changed decision-making processes can be found with Operation Vula, in which Revolutionary Council–member Mac Maharaj transferred arms and set up a military underground within South Africa to wage a “people’s war,” modeled on Vietcong resistance to the American occupation of Vietnam. Operation Vula was only known to a handful of ANC leaders such as Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki, and, later, Jacob Zuma. While many cite an ANC tradition of collective decision-making, Operation Vula shows that the process was often concentrated among the organization’s leadership during late apartheid. Given Thabo Mbeki’s leadership role, this closure of democratic space within the ANC was an important political precedent for his outsized role in post-apartheid HIV/AIDS politics.
While the ANC’s exile structures closed ranks, the numbers of black South Africans residing in urban peripheries continued to grow. As living conditions in the homelands deteriorated and political activity was limited by traditional leaders loyal to the apartheid state, what had once been a circular pattern of male migrant labor to and from cities increasingly included women and children.61 Densely populated periurban areas grew in the 1980s when large tracts of land for legalized informal residence were opened using Section 6A of the amended Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (Mabin 1992). In Cape Town this was done in response to growing numbers of people moving to the city from the rural Transkei in the early 1980s. As these numbers grew, the apartheid state lost the capacity to monitor people’s movements and the spaces they inhabited (Desai and Pithouse 2004).
As black urban and periurban communities grew, the anti-apartheid movement mobilized them to expand the fight against apartheid. Civic organizations, including street committees and township-wide governing bodies, developed that were based on the notion of community self-organization. The urban civics movement operated as the de facto local state in black urban areas during the 1980s. In addition, the United Democratic Front (UDF) formed in 1983 as an umbrella organization to house the growing trade union movement, faith-based organizations, and urban civics structures, among others.62 The UDF formed in response to the apartheid state’s proposal of a tricameral legislative structure, an attempt to ward off revolutionary social change.63 The apartheid state sought to include the limited input of “Indians” and “coloureds” but at rates that were not representative of population distribution and without meaningful voting power. Critically, the tricameral parliament excluded black South Africans, as they remained citizens of the “politically independent” Bantustans. The UDF combined the various elements of the anti-apartheid movement and included the powerful National Union of Mineworkers. When combined with the mass stay-away campaigns and rent boycotts coordinated by urban civics structures, the UDF served as the backbone for the emerging Mass Democratic Movement aimed at ending apartheid.
The anti-apartheid movement within South Africa built upon structures of democratic decision-making and nonracial alliance building that were developed by early anti-apartheid activists. Building on the Freedom Charter and the forms of self-governance that had emerged in black South African urban areas, the anti-apartheid movement carried forward the political principles and social practices developed in response to white settler rule. These would inform the broad social mobilization that ended apartheid as well as social movements during the post-apartheid era. Anti-apartheid activists became centrally involved in a series of “new social movements” that emerged in response to post-apartheid austerity, and the political approach and practices of the anti-apartheid movement are also evident in the South African HIV/AIDS movement’s campaign for treatment access.
Conclusion
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