militant wing of the ANC), Poqo (Pure, the militant wing of the PAC), and the
African Resistance Movement (a multiracial organization consisting main-
ly of young white professionals and students) made over two hundred
bomb attacks on post offices and other government buildings and on rail-
road and electrical installations near the main industrial centers. The gov-
ernment succeeded in breaking the three organizations, however. The po-
lice forces achieved a major coup in July 1963, when they arrested
seventeen Umkhonto leaders in a house near Johannesburg. By the end of
1964, the first phase of violent resistance was over, and for another decade
the country was quiescent. Mandela and Sisulu were serving life sentences
on Robben Island four miles from Cape Town. Sobukwe, too, was jailed on
Robben Island until 1969, when the government released him but kept him
politically impotent by banning him; he lived in Kimberley until his death
in 1978. Tambo escaped the net and settled in Lusaka, Zambia, where he
became acting president-general
of the ANC after the death of Lutuli in
1967.
Quiescence did not mean acquiescence. Three significant developments
fueled a spirit of resistance until it broke out in massive confrontations
in