The failure of unarmed protest in the face of an increasingly brutal regime hastened the revival of the armed struggle which had lain dormant since the last Zulu rising - the Bambata Rebellion in 1906. The ANC's Defiance Campaign of 1952 had failed to end segregation in public places. After the issuing of the 1955 Freedom Charter, 156 leaders were arrested and many were detained in prison or under house arrest for long periods.

Risings by unarmed peasants broke out in 1957 in several parts of the country from the northern Transvaal to the Transkei, largely in protest against new apartheid legislation; they were crushed by armed police and soldiers with Sten guns and armoured cars.

In 1959 the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) was formed by Robert Sobukwe as an African party in rivalry to Albert Luthuli's non-racial ANC. The joint ANC/PAC anti-pass campaign in I960 led to the killing of 67 unarmed Africans at Sharpeville and the banning of the ANC and the PAC. Since unarmed resistance had failed completely, the younger and more militant members of the ANC and PAC formed underground movements of military resistance, namely - Umkhonto we Sizwe and POQO.

Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation) was formed in June 1961 by Nelson Mandela and other ANC militants. Mandela is a romantic and legendary figure in modern African history. He was born at Umtata in the Transkei in 1918, the eldest son of a Tembu chief. After graduating at Fort Hare University College, Mandela qualified as a lawyer. He was prominent in the organization of the Defiance Campaign in 1952, and was elected President of the ANC's Transvaal Province branch in the same year. As one of the accused in the 1956 Treason Trials he helped to conduct the defence, and shared in the triumph when the accused were acquitted.

In April 1961 Mandela went underground to organize the May general strike in protest against South Africa's new Republican status. The next month he organized Umkhonto and lived the life of an outlaw until his arrest in August 1962.
Umkhonto we Sizwe's objective was to disrupt the life of the country by sabotage of government installations. It was not concerned with attacks on people; it was controlled violence rather than terrorism. It operated through a cell organization, and was inter-racial in composition. Its adherents were mainly ANC members (nearly all black) or Communist Party members (nearly all white). The following extracts from the Umkhonto we Sizwe Manifesto, a leaflet issued on 16 December 1961, illustrate the aims and nature of the organization:

Umkhonto We Sizwe is a new, independent body, formed by Africans. It includes in its ranks South Africans of all races . . . Refusal to resort to force has been interpreted by the Government as an invitation to use armed force against the people without any fear of reprisals. The methods of Umkhonto We Sizwe mark a break with that past. . - The Government policy of force, repression and violence will no longer be met with non-violent resistance only! The choice is not ours; it has been made by the Nationalist Government which has rejected every peaceable demand by the people for rights and freedom and answered every such demand with force and yet more force!. . . we are working in the best interests of all the people of this country - black, brown and white.''11

Mandela was very conscious that Umkhonto we Sizwe was a link with the primary resistance of the Africans against colonial conquest. In his autobiographical note Mandela recalled an aspect of his childhood:

The elders would tell us about the Liberation and how it was fought by our ancestors in defence of our country, as well as the acts of valour performed by generals and soldiers during those epic days. I hoped, and vowed then, that amongst the pleasures that might offer me, would be the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their struggle for freedom.12

Umkhonto we Sizwe carried out 193 acts of sabotage by May 1963, mainly in the Eastern Cape and around Port Elizabeth. Its activities were spectacular and symbolic rather than effective; random and ill-directed and only of nuisance value. The leaders then realized that sabotage would not succeed in bringing about political change, and made plans to move towards guerilla warfare.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which lam prepared to die.

About three hundred men were sent for guerilla training in Ethiopia, Algeria and China. But the movement was crushed by the police, who managed to infiltrate the cell organization and make a large number of arrests. The Rivonia Trials were held in 1963 and 1964. Mandela was accused of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the Government by revolution. In the closing speech in his defence he said:

Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, where he remained and spent 27 good years of suffering and torture, with five hundred other political prisoners courageous enough to stand up for their people's freedom. Mandela was set free in 1990 with a few others yet most prisoners died in that prison.

Some Umkhonto we Sizwe activists paid the ultimate sacrifice, and should not be forgotten. Among them are Vuyisile Mini, the dockers' trade-union leader, Zinakile Mkaba and Wilson Khayingo, who on 6 November 1964 were hanged at Pretoria Central Jail, allegedly for having been members of the regional command of Umkhonto we Sizwe which ordered the killing of a state witness. The actual killers were found after the hangings.

POQO emerged at the same time as Umkhonto we Sizwe as the military wing of the PAC. Unlike Umkhonto, POQO attacked white people, a form of fanonist violence carried out with pangas, machete-like knives and only a few guns. POQO activities were scattered and uncoordinated and the general mass rising it planned never took place. Over three thousand POQO members were arrested by June 1963. The PAC then turned to the strategy of a protracted armed struggle, and sent more men abroad for guerilla training.

Sabotage was also carried out by the African Resistance Movement (ARM) made up mainly of white liberals. For example in July 1964 a time-bomb exploded in the "Europeans Only' concourse of Johannesburg railway station, killing an elderly woman and maiming a child. The bomb had been planted by John Harris, a white activist in the South African Liberal Party who was hanged in January 1965.

The sabotage campaigns of 1961 to 1964 were met by Dr Verwoerd, the Prime Minister, and his Minister of Justice, John Vorster, with blanket repression and sheer ruthlessness. Torture in South African prisons and police stations now became routine. The budget for the defence and security forces rose from 63 million dollars in I960 to 375 million in 1964.

The government had succeeded in crushing the ANC, PAC and CP so that by the late 1960s they had virtually ceased to exist inside South Africa and had become almost wholly exile movements. The ANC now tried its hand at guerilla warfare.

ANC guerillas trained in Zambia and Tanzania and from August 1967 they were fighting alongside ZAPU in Rhodesia. They made little impact in Rhodesia and none in South Africa which they failed to reach. For nearly a decade the ANC guerilla army existed in name only until the latter half of 1976, when key elements of the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa transferred their base of operations to Maputo, to take advantage of Soviet aid and an ideologically congenial host country. The time was ripe for a guerilla offensive into South Africa because the Soweto Rising of June 1976 and its brutal suppression caused thousands of young recruits to leave South Africa for guerilla training. (The Soweto Rising involved rioting but it was not an armed rising; the violence was committed by the police rather than by the school students; consequently Soweto will be looked at in the next chapter.)

Oliver Reginald Tambo (1917-1993) sustained the struggle against apartheid. He lived abroad as he solisited the ANC support.

At the end of November 1976 in a small-scale but symbolic incident, four ANC guerillas of the revised Umkhonto we Sizwe entered South Africa at the junction of the Swaziland and Mozambique borders. They made an attack on a police unit, and a vast manhunt by land and air was launched, but without success.
The murder in police custody on 12 September 1977 of Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader, reminded a new generation that renewal of the armed struggle was probably the only way to change the political situation, and many more young men left the country for guerrilla training.

In November 1977 one guerilla was killed and another was captured when police surprised two men in a hut containing a cache of Russian-made weapons and explosives in the Pongola area of northern Natal. Guerrillas bombed railway and police stations and shopping centres in November and December.
with guerillas at various points in the northern Transvaal after the battle near Rustenberg.

In February 1978 guerillas operating from Mozambique ambushed a police patrol near the Swaziland border. In April several guerillas were arrested in Durban with large quantities of arms and explosives. In the same month Brigadier Zietsman, head of the security police, admitted of the ANC: 'Using classic guerilla tactics it is attempting to involve as many security force units as possible in the rural areas, while sending small groups to the cities as well.

In July 1978 over a hundred ANC guerillas were awaiting trial in South Africa; many more were still at large. On 12 August a four-hour battle took place near Rustenberg, 75 miles west of Pretoria, between a small Umkhonto we Sizwe detachment and the South African army assisted by the Bophuthatswana national guard, which encircled the guerillas and sprayed the area with gunfire, napalm and defoliant chemicals. There were casualties on both sides and some of the guerillas managed to retreat and escape. The South African army and police fought a number of clashes

COMRADE THAMBO MBEKI, former South African President was a strong member of the ANC armed wing in charge of foreign affairs. His father also played a greater role.
The South African army expanded its counter-insurgency units in September 1978 and deployed them in the border areas of Natal and the Transvaal near Mozambique.
They began to clear a strip ten kilometres wide along six hundred kilometres of border as a free-fire zone. In November 1978 official militarization began of white farmers in the border areas, along lines already developed in Rhodesia; a step that reflected the concern at the increased guerilla activity. In 1979, on advice from Israeli military experts, a plan was announced to offer land near the border at low prices to young whiles with military training. They would settle in small towns to form a chain of defence strongholds. The towns and farms would be equipped with alarm systems, flood-lighting and two-way radio contact, and would be fitted into the security network with the police and the army. In August 1979 South African planes bombed an ANC training camp in Angola, one plane being shot down.