South Africa and the Turn to Armed Resistance

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper focusses on the circumstances under which various political organisations, particularly the ANC and the SACP, in South Africa turned to the armed struggle as a means to prosecuting the liberation struggle in the early 1960s. It looks at the setbacks and shortcomings that this shift in strategy and tactics suffered and the challenges that arose at the time. From the perspective of the ANC and its allies it is important to appreciate that the armed struggle was an extension of the political struggle. The paper seeks to unravel some of the complex theoretical and empirical issues that were at play across the broad spectrum of organisations that regarded themselves as opposed to the apartheid system. We focus on the features of the mass struggles in the 1950s and the repressive actions of the state culminating in the massacres at Sharpeville and Nyanga, the imposition of the State of Emergency and the mass detentions that created a climate in which by 1960-62 almost all organisations that could lay claim to be part of the struggle had concluded that the time had arrived for armed resistance to apartheid. The paper draws together the range of groupings and organisations that entered this field in the early 1960s, looks at the response of the state and the setbacks that these different efforts endured. It concludes at the point where international solidarity becomes a significant force against the repressive actions of the apartheid state and the continuation of the liberation struggle depended on the regrouping of forces of the ANC and MK in exile.