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 that students be taught in both English and Afrikaans equally. As students marched through the township, they confronted police barricades and, shortly thereafter, gunfire. The young people shot and killed by the South African police included Hastings Ndlovu and Hector Pieterson. Pieterson’s death was recorded in what is now an iconic image, 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
