This was the background out of which Inkatha emerged, and out of which the so-called Black Consciousness Movement emerged. A people living in extremely harsh conditions who experience social, political and economic oppression will always strive to express themselves politically. In the face of extremely harsh security laws and an active secret police organisation employing paid informers, many thought that political organisations structured on membership lists and arranged into branch and regional structures suffered from the vulnerability illustrated by the ease with which the South African Government had crushed the internal ANC and PAC.

During the 1950's the ANC, the Natal Indian Congress and the Congress of Democrats adopted passive resistance as a political strategy. They, however, soon learned that it is impossible to keep the masses passive when they are attacked by tear gas, police dogs and baton charges. For this reason, a decision had to be made to abandon the Mahatma Gandhi passive resistance ideal. The PAC rejected this decision and South Africa was witness to the folly of this decision when the ANC's worst fears were confirmed in the Sharpville massacre.  It is tragic for South Africa that the Government decided to crush the ANC at this point when the Movement was beginning to learn something about real politics. Had the Government not taken such drastic action and had it not destroyed their leadership which was beginning to learn these lessons, the political history of the 1970's and 80's would have been entirely different.

By the mid 70's heightened political awareness therefore expressed itself in two different idioms. The Black Consciousness Movement, which rejected politics dependent upon membership based organisations, sought to provide a leadership which could mobilise mass protests and bring about the kind of confrontations which the Government would, in the end, find unmanageable. The Black People's Convention as a leading black consciousness organisation in the 1970's, spear-headed the development of protest politics. It was decidedly not a product of the ANC's leadership in exile. In the early years of the BPC the dominant attitude towards the ANC was that it was for an older generation which had failed and, if anything, there was a greater national affinity between BPC and the PAC. This was later to change as it became more and more apparent that the PAC was a spent force.

Black Consciousness thinking at the time was that the struggle for liberation in this country should be directed from within the country, and its leadership under Steve Biko attempted to develop a relatively independent internal political organisation. In liaising with the exiled leadership of the ANC and the PAC, they offered a political partnership provided that they, as BPC, could retain their identity and be given seats on the national executives of the ANC and PAC as representatives of an independent political movement. They thought in terms of coalitions rather than in terms of being part of a continuing ANC or PAC structure.

By 1975 the BPC had emerged to lead protest politics aimed at the mobilisation of mass anger and its employment to create the kind of disruptions to South African life which would prove to be unmanageable for the South African Government.

Inkatha, on the other hand, had emerged to lead black South Africans in politics based on a central structured organisation, the prime purpose of which was to provide secure bases for democratic opposition. The Inkatha option was the option for constituency politics and the employment of a multi-strategy approach in which people would be given political roles in whatever they were doing, wherever they were.