Sharpeville's Deadly Turn: How South Africa's Fight for Freedom Went Underground

The 1960s: When South Africa’s Liberation Struggle Moved Underground

Sixty-nine people fell dead at Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. Police opened fire on an unarmed crowd that had gathered to protest pass laws, the documents that controlled where Black South Africans could live and work. Two more died in Langa, Cape Town. Within days, the government declared a state of emergency, arrested over 2,000 people, and mobilized military regiments into the streets.

The aftermath transformed everything. Both the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned in April 1960. Their leaders faced arrest, detention, and imprisonment in waves. Robert Sobukwe, the PAC president, was sentenced to three years in prison for inciting protest. Nelson Mandela, already underground, was captured in August 1962 and sentenced to five years, only to face trial again in 1963 at Rivonia, where he and others received life sentences.

Forced from the open, both movements went underground. The PAC established Poqo, its armed wing. The ANC, working with the South African Communist Party (SACP), created Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), “The Spear of the Nation,” which announced itself through bomb blasts on December 16, 1961, targeting apartheid structures in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, and Durban. Hundreds of activists fled the country. Oliver Tambo left South Africa in 1960 on ANC orders to continue the organization’s work abroad. Moses Kotane departed for Dar es Salaam in 1963. Chris Hani, arrested while trying to reach exile, was freed by the United Nations and eventually reached Moscow for military training.

Meanwhile, inside South Africa, the government’s response was systematic and brutal. New security laws gave authorities power to arrest and detain without trial. The Sabotage Act of 1962 made sabotage a capital offense. The Ninety Day Detention law of 1963 allowed authorities to hold suspects for three months in solitary confinement without access to lawyers. The Terrorism Act of 1967 permitted indefinite detention; the minister could withhold even the names of those held.

The trials that followed became landmarks of the era. The Rivonia Trial opened in October 1963 after a police raid on Lilliesleaf Farm in Johannesburg and saw the arrest of virtually the entire MK leadership: Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Raymond Mhlaba, and others. On June 12, 1964, Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, and five others were sentenced to life imprisonment. The Fischer Trial followed, charging Communist Party members including advocate Bram Fischer, who later went underground for 294 days before his arrest and sentencing to life in prison in 1966.

Poqo members faced their own trials and executions. In 1962, Joseph Mqitsane and Aaron Njokwane were convicted of murder and executed. In 1964, Vuyisile Mini, Wilson Khayinga, and Zinakile Mkhaba, leaders of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), were executed. Others died in violent clashes. In November 1962, police violently suppressed a Poqo march in Paarl, killing five members. The following month, Matthews Mayezana Mali was shot dead while leading a march to hand over grievances at the Paarl police station.

Outside South Africa, a different kind of resistance took shape. The Anti-Apartheid Movement formed in Britain in 1960, becoming an umbrella organization that embraced student bodies, trade unions, and sections of the British Labour Party. In exile, the ANC established military training bases and offices in Tanzania, Zambia, and other African countries. In 1964, the PAC moved its headquarters from Lesotho to Dar es Salaam. The Organization of African Unity, formed in 1963, committed itself to the liberation of every African country from colonialism and repression. The United Nations condemned apartheid repeatedly, though enforcement remained weak.

New forms of resistance emerged inside the country as the decade closed. In 1968, student activist Steve Biko broke with the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to form the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), committed to Black Consciousness. By 1969, the ANC opened its membership to White people, among them Jack Simons and Ray Alexander Simons. The Morogoro Consultative Conference in Tanzania, held in April and May 1969, signaled the ANC’s commitment to both armed struggle and mass political organizing, recognizing that rebuilding underground structures within South Africa was essential to the war effort.

By decade’s end, the liberation movements had been severely crippled inside the country but were regrouping in exile. The government’s security apparatus had grown into a vast machinery of control. The struggle had not ended. It had only changed form, and the question of what that new form could achieve, against an increasingly entrenched state, remained unanswered.