THEAPARTHEIDERA
The year 1960 was a watershed in modern South African history. Pre-
viously, nearly every ANC leader had been deeply committed
to non-
violence. But nonviolent methods had achieved nothing except a series of
defeats at the hands of a violent state. In those circumstances, the ANC
concluded, and the PAC agreed, that South Africa was not like India, where
passive resistance had persuaded the British to quit. As Mandela put it in
1964, when he was on trial for sabotage after his eventual arrest: "We of the
ANC had always stood for a non-racial democracy, and we shrank from any
policy which might drive the races further apart than they already were. But
the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African
people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and
fewer rights ....
[I]t would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders
to continue preaching non-violence at a time when the Government met
our peaceful demands with force."61
The first attempts to meet state violence with revolutionary violence
were not successful. Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation, the
militant wing of the ANC), Poqo (Pure, the militant wing of the PAC), and the
African Resistance Movement (a multiracial organization consisting main-