LONG MARCH TO FREEDOM:
A 350-YEAR JOURNEY TO LIBERATION (1652-1994)
Repression and Armed Struggle
The Treason Trial dragged on for 5 years and the 156 accused were eventually acquitted. It did
however elicit the first real condemnation from the global community on what was happening in
South Africa. In March 1960, police opened fire on peaceful Pan-African Congress protestors in
Sharpeville, in what is now Gauteng, sixty nine of whom were killed. The Sharpeville Massacre made
world headlines and South Africa started to slide into isolation.
The apartheid government responded by imposing a state of emergency, introducing detention without
trial, and banning the liberation organisations, including the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress,
forcing them underground. Their policies of passive resistance had been met by violence and repression
from the state, and the only remaining option was armed struggle.
In October 1960, the National Party Government broke with the British Commonwealth and declared
South Africa a republic after winning a whites-only referendum. Leaders of the black political
organisations not yet arrested were in hiding, or had left the country as exiles.
The ANC established external missions in sympathetic African states and in London, led for the next 30 years by Oliver Tambo.
In 1961, secreted in a safe house in Rivonia, Johannesburg Nelson Mandela and activists from the ANC,
the South African Communist Party and other organisations, formed the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we
Sizwe (MK – Spear of the Nation) aiming to sabotage government targets.
In 1963 state security forces
swooped on the hideout and arrested almost the entire MK leadership and the ensuing Rivonia Trial would
see them sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. The state regarded the resistance movements as
well and truly crushed and the for the next ten years there was little protest action within the country itself.
Ahmed Kathrada (1929 – 2017)
Anti-Apartheid & Social Justice Activist, Rivonia Trialist and Robben Island prisoner
Robert Sobukwe (1924 – 1978)
President of the Pan Africanist Congress
Bram Fischer (1908 – 1975)
Afrikaner Revolutionary, Lawyer, South African Communist Party Leader, Member of the Congress of Democrats, Political Prisoner
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