At the time of the formation of the ANC, there was no question of relying on armed force as a means of struggle. Only ten or so years previously, the Boers had tried that method against the British and failed. Bambata had resorted to arms in 1906 and also failed. Deputations, petitions, demonstrations, and conference resolutions were the order of the day. Besides, the Africans had been forcibly disarmed. The ANC, therefore, led the people into essentially peaceful and non-violent forms of action. It was not unusual for governments of the pre-apartheid era to take some notice of African demands and hold out some promise of possible concessions. In some cases, political pressure in the form of public meetings and protest demonstrations yielded favourable results. Although the overall political and economic situation of the Africans remained consistently intolerable, there was always hope for securing some redress of grievances through peaceful means. The African was not denied such rights as freedom of assembly, speech, organisation, the press, and movement – all of which have since completely vanished.
The pattern of legislation passed by successive governments was distinctly discriminatory against the African people and aimed at establishing and perpetuating a servant-and-master relationship between black and white. Thus, Africans employed by white farmers were treated like serfs and worked from dawn to dusk for a mere pittance; the poor and hunger-stricken inhabitants of the overcrowded and arid reserves were subjected to heavy taxation; and, in the urban areas, Africans were harassed by laws requiring passes and were chased from pillar to post by the police.
During World War Two, Hitler became the hero, and Nazism the faith, of hundreds of Afrikaners. The fanaticism of the SS was a virtue to be emulated. As the Jews had been shown their place in Hitler’s Germany, so would the Kaffirs in South Africa. But the Africans, heartened by the Allies’ promise of a post-war world in which the fundamental rights of all men would be respected, became increasingly impatient with their lot. Institutions such as the Advisory Boards, the Natives’ Representative Council, the Transkeian Bunga, and the “Native Parliamentary Representatives” – an insignificant handful of whites representing Africans in the South African Senate and House of Assembly – were all attacked by Africans as dummy bodies, and agitation for their boycott was started. Anti-pass campaigns were launched in urban areas where the Africans were most affected by the pass system, protests against poor housing and low wages mounted, and the rural population resisted government schemes that interfered with their rights to land and that sought to limit their livestock.
The war ended, but repression continued unabated. In 1946, the African mine workers in Johannesburg and the Reef went on strike. The strike was ruthlessly repressed and several Africans were killed. The Natives’ Representative Council, a dummy African parliament, which, since its establishment in 1937, had struggled in vain to prevent the enactment of discriminatory legislation, adjourned indefinitely in protest. In the same year, the South African Indians launched a passive-resistance campaign against a law restricting their right to land ownership. In the meantime, the growing African National Congress continued protesting against various forms of segregation. The government, on the other hand, adopted more repressive legislation.
It was in this atmosphere of discontent and expectation that the black cloud of reaction and brutal repression descended on South Africa: Dr Malan’s Nationalist Party seized political power in May 1948. These were the disciples of Hitler. One year later, the shape of things to come was clear. Laws enacted by previous governments were reinforced with vicious amendments and were vigorously enforced by officials who, for sheer brutality, seemed to have been specially recruited from some prehistoric bush where cruelty was a highly prized virtue. Soon the expression, “The devil has been let loose on this country”, became current among Africans.
Responding to this new challenge, the ANC adopted in 1949 a Programme of Action that stipulated that boycotts, strikes, non-collaboration, and “civil disobedience” would now be used as methods and forms of action in the political struggle. The Programme contemplated participation by the masses of the people. It did not raise the question of violence versus non-violence. The appearance of the word “non-violence” in the political vocabulary of the ANC was a product of the objective conditions under which the Programme was being put into action. The use of the expression “civil disobedience” in the Programme was, however, of significance. The ANC was an ordinary political organisation that had always used methods of political pressure recognised in a democratic country. These methods had been non-violent, but there had been no specific declaration of policy excluding violence or positively proclaiming non-violence. In the course of normal demonstration or other forms of political action, the people could conceivably have been provoked into conduct that amounted to civil disobedience, and this could have happened without a policy decision authorising such conduct. Why then did the 1949 ANC conference go out of its way to provide for “civil disobedience”?
The force with which apartheid struck at the African masses called for action, and the conference decided to commit the organisation to specified drastic forms of action. But the Programme of Action did not define “civil disobedience”. Did it mean civil disorder? Mob violence? Rioting? It most certainly did not mean any of these types of conduct. The keynote of the disobedience was to be discipline. The expression “civil disobedience” referred to the deliberate breach, or defiance, of government laws, regulations, and orders. The conference, in interpreting civil disobedience in terms of disciplined and purposeful mass action, emphasised non-violence. It called for self-control on the part of the people and urged them to withstand acts of provocation by the police, who were obviously anxious for a showdown. Failure to emphasise the need for discipline would have been a fatal political blunder. Non-violence was thus a political tactic that could be changed according to the demands of the political situation.
On 1 May 1950, 18 Africans were killed by the police during a one-day strike staged as the climax to a provincial campaign for universal adult suffrage. On 26 June 1950, the Africans’ first national protest strike was called. The strike was the culmination of a country-wide campaign of protest against the Unlawful Organisations Bill introduced by the government and aimed at stamping out all opposition to its racial and oppressive policies. It was also intended as an act of mourning for the Africans killed on l May and earlier in the liberation struggle. The strike was a great success and demonstrated the readiness of the oppressed people for determined political action. The Unlawful Organisations Bill was withdrawn as a result of the protest agitation. (It was later introduced and enacted, with slight textual amendments, as the Suppression of Communism Act.)
The policy of uncompromising apartheid was carried out with vigour, violence, hate, and haste. This has remained the pattern of Nationalist Party rule in South Africa to the present day. The country has been in a state of perpetual political crisis now since 1948. It has been the blackest period in the past 60 years and, for the Africans, the bloodiest since the Boer invasions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 15 short years, hundreds of innocent Africans have been shot dead by the police; many more have been wounded by police gunfire during raids, while under arrest, and while in prison; and many have been beaten to death on white-owned farms. In addition, millions of Africans have been convicted of petty offences, and the average number sentenced to death annually, for what are essentially political offences, has been higher than in any corresponding period since Jan van Riebeeck landed in the country in 1652.
When this gruesome phase in the history of the country began to assume a regular pattern in 1950, numerous protests and demonstrations against government policy were staged by many organisations from every racial group. in one way or another, the various groups and movements representing the vast majority of the population voiced their protest. These groups saw the clear advantage in co-ordinating the anti-apartheid forces and encouraging joint action against the common enemy. Furthermore, since it was the expression of the government to enforce sharp racial divisions among the population and to set up separate and possibly hostile racial camps, the very act of co-operation and unity among all opponents of racial discrimination and white domination was in itself an attack on government policy.