The Sharpeville massacre transformed the struggle for liberation into armed conflict in which MK launched 200 attacks in 18 months, writes Dougie Oakes.
For more than a year, leaders of the ANC and their Communist Party of South Africa allies agonised over whether to wage an armed struggle against the apartheid rulers of South Africa.
For decades they, and those who came before them, believed it was possible to fight racism and achieve equal rights for all South Africans by moral persuasion. They had little to show for their efforts, however. Indeed, before 1948, every step they took forward was followed by two steps backwards.
But then, when the National Party (NP) crept into power after the 1948 poll, the illusion was finally buried. Those who had pinned their hopes on persuasion were dealt a savage but necessary blow.
The new all-white administration made it clear that there would be no place in their version of a new South Africa for black South Africans. And they wasted no time in demonstrating how they intended governing.
Their rule would be built on a foundation of baasskap
Laws were passed to keep black people out of what were deemed to be white areas. Land grabs became the order of the day, with black people being moved out of areas they had occupied for centuries, to make way for whites. Black people were forced to carry passes, or run the risk of being jailed. Furthermore, all the best jobs were reserved for whites.
The grand plan of the new government was to create a South Africa in which there would be no black people, by moving them to so-called homelands via their Bantu Self-Government Act.
To the growing anger of leaders of the ANC, the apartheid policies of the NP were increasingly supported by the white electorate, with the NP’s majority increasing with every election after 1948.
Two events forced black leaders to rethink their strategy. The first, a revolt by the Pondo people of the Eastern Cape, lasted from 1950 to 1961. The second was the Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 residents of the East Rand township were shot dead by police on March 21, 1960.
The revolt in Pondoland deeply distressed leaders such as Nelson Mandela. In discussions with community members in Pondoland, they were asked repeatedly to “get us weapons”, and each time they were forced to concede that they could not help.
But it was the aftermath of Sharpeville that pushed the struggle for liberation into a totally new direction.
On April 8, justice minister Frans Erasmus told Parliament that he had signed a proclamation banning the ANC and the PAC for a year in terms of the Unlawful Organisations Act. Immediately afterwards, dozens of activists went into hiding following a tip-off of a countrywide sweep by members of the security forces to round up members of the now-banned organisations.
It was at this stage that the question of an armed struggle began to be debated with greater intensity.
A change of tack was always going to be a difficult decision for the ANC. For decades, it had followed a Gandhian approach of “non-violence”. Moreover, at the very time it was being urged to adopt a more pragmatic approach to the Struggle, it’s president was the deeply religious Chief Albert Luthuli. Many ANC members felt that Luthuli would never countenance an armed struggle.
And yet, clearly, something had to be done.
Shortly after Sharpeville, Michael Harmel, a journalist and member of the Communist Party, asked: “In South Africa, what next?
“The struggle for freedom in South Africa has entered a new phase since the terrible massacre at Sharpeville and other towns on March 21, 1960,” he wrote.
“No-violence is not an absolute principle. It was correct in the past, and still is today, to warn the people against being provoked into desperate and useless acts of unorganised retaliation. But if the Verwoerd regime continues to butcher unarmed and defenceless people, it will become more and more futile to preach ‘non-violence’, until the time comes when it will be more than futile - even treacherous. The stage may be reached in the life of any nation when the stern and sacred duty presents itself to organise for battle.”
In the debate that followed, Mandela hinted in an interview with the Rand Daily Mail in May 1961 that the old method of struggle - which is to say non-violent protest - may well be coming to an end.
Shortly afterwards, he told a British television interviewer: “There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile for us to continue talking peace and non-violence against a government whose reply is only savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people, and I think that the time has come for us to consider, in the light of our experiences in this stay-at-home, whether the methods which we have applied so far are adequate.”
Mandela was sharply rebuked by fellow ANC member (and a member of the Communist Party) Moses Kotane, who argued that the time was not right for an armed struggle.
In his book Umkhonto we Sizwe - the ANC’s Armed Struggle, Thula Simpson wrote that Kotane, in chiding Mandela, had said: “Because of the severe measures taken by the government, you are unable to continue in the old way. The difficulties have paralysed you and you now want to talk a revolutionary language and talk about armed struggle, when in fact there is still room for the old method that we are using if we are imaginative and determined enough.“
Not even Mandela’s close friend Walter Sisulu came to his aid in the verbal battering that he took.
Although angry at this lambasting, Mandela worked even harder to win over the doubters. Even Luthuli was won over to the concept of an armed struggle. “If anyone thinks I am a pacifist”, he said, “let him try to take my chickens, and he will know how wrong he is!”
Mandela of the ANC and Joe Slovo of the Communist Party were mandated to form the new military organisation.
The name they settled on was Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation, or MK). MK’s aim, they said, was to “hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom”. And its manifesto was that “the time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa.
“We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom.”
The first phase of armed action was launched on December 16, 1961, Dingaan’s Day, in which the Boers’ victory over the Zulus at Blood River was commemorated. It took the form of a sabotage campaign aimed at government installations, with strict instructions given to avoid attacks that would lead to injury or loss of life.
Slovo said later: “No one believed that the tactic of sabotage could, on its own, lead to the collapse of the racist state. It would be the first phase of ‘controlled violence’ designed to serve a number of
purposes.
“It would be a graphic pointer to the need for carefully planned action rather than spontaneous or terrorist acts of retaliation which were already in evidence.
And it would demonstrate that the responsibility for the slide towards bloody civil war lay squarely with the regime.”
Over the next 18 months, MK launched some 200 attacks on state installations, many of which went unreported. But from small beginnings, it grew big enough to help defeat the mightiest army in Africa as part of the ANC’s complex People’s War strategy, in which it was but one component - others included international support and its principle element, mass mobilisation.