Move to armed struggle

• PAC


  Pan Africanist Congress
• PAC


  • Turned to underground organisation
  • Had grass roots networks among migrant workers in Cape Town that provided a vehicle for covert action
  • Focused on political education through small meetings in African townships, with emphasis on history, the violence of colonial conquest and the loss of land
  • Managed to get hold of works by Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Fanon and those with education explained them to those without
  • Saw Mau Mau in Kenya as an attractive model, more for the fear it seemed to instill in whites than for any detailed knowledge of its strategies
  • Leader Robert Sobukwe was kept in prison and unable to influence the new direction of strategy
• Poqo


  Movement formed in 1961 that would be prepared to go beyond non-violent protest
• Poqo


  • Essentially a movement among migrant workers with little central control by the PAC
  • Maintained Africanist ideologies and justified violence against whites
  • Cells spread to other Western Cape towns and back to the Eastern Cape
  • Planned to blow up the Blue Train and kill Kaiser Matanzima
  • Responsible for the Paarl march in 1962 which led to the killing of two whites and five protestors
  • Staged the notorious Mbashe Bridge killings of a white family staying in a caravan in 1963
• Poqo killings were well-publicised and described in lurid terms in the white press which saw them as examples of African savagery
• Both the PAC and Poqo understood their actions as entirely political, an expression of radical African nationalism and armed struggle against a state that gave them no alternative
• Of the men executed by hanging after political trials in the 1960s, 62 were in Poqo, 23 were Mpondo rebels, nine from Cato Manor, and seven from the ANC and MK
• Neither the ANC nor PAC had the capacity for a sustained armed struggle due to lack of physical base, training, and support from abroad, as well as the repressive power of the state
• Mandela was able to travel abroad for six months and operate underground but was arrested in 1962
• uMkhonto weSizwe (MK)


  Armed organisation set up as an independent military wing acting in support of the liberation movement, led jointly by Mandela representing the ANC and Joe Slovo for the CP
• The Soviet Union made the largest financial contribution and other communist governments, such as East Germany, helped with training and education for MK
• Attempts were made to set up MK regional commands within South Africa, with targets including strategic sites such as communications posts and power units rather than places where loss of life was a risk
• The first major act of sabotage by MK was planned for 16 December 1961, which was the public holiday called Dingaan's Day when white South Africa commemorated the Boer victory over the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River in 1838
• Mandela: 'Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people?'
• In planning the direction and form that MK would take, they considered four types of violent activities: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and open revolution
• The ANC had been reluctant to embrace violence, so it made sense to start with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm - sabotage
• The South African Communist Party was the first to adopt the armed struggle in principle, even though some members were doubtful
• In June 1961 the ANC itself explicitly decided on armed struggle, though some including Luthuli and most members of the South Indian Congress were still against violence out of principle
• Oliver Tambo and others had escaped into exile where they were beyond the power of the South African state