The Sounds of Silence: Structural Change and Collective Action in the Fight against Apartheid

Abstract

The 1960s are usually seen by accounts of modern South African history as a period of quiescence in which resistance to apartheid was crushed. A closer look at the period reveals that the decade was a period in which change in both social structure and political agency laid the foundation for resistance in the 1970s and beyond – a time in which the seeds of apartheid's destruction were sown. The structural change which began this process was the economy's need for more skilled black labour; this gave black people greater bargaining power. The change in agency was the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement with its stress on black collective action. They combined to forge a new form of resistance politics which ultimately defeated apartheid. This history invites not only a re-evaluation of the 1960s but of the respective roles of structure and agency in South Africa's past and present.