trialists stopped short of working for changes in the political system before
1978.5 1
Lacking substantial support from the other side of the color line, black
South Africans continued to face immense odds in coping with their erst-
while conquerors. Poor, unarmed, and insecure, most experienced life as a
continuous struggle for survival. For many Africans, success involved
adapting to apartheid by circumventing the law, living in the informal
economy, or acquiring a powerful patron-a
chief or a white person.
Other Africans found a niche in the formal economy as teachers, nurses, or
industrial workers. Such people ceased to be marginal. They formed the
nucleus of an African middle class and an African working class.52
Needled by the increasing brutality of the government and inspired by
contemporary events in tropical Africa and other parts of the world, black
leaders gradually transcended their regional, ethnic, and class divisions
and devised more effectivemeans ofmobilizing the masses and confronting
the regime. Soon after the National party came to power, a new generation
took control of the African National Congress, spurred by the wartime
protests in Johannesburg and the miners' strike of 1946. In 1949, the