APARTHEID AS A STUMBLING BLOCK TO REASONABLENESS IN BLACK POLITICS AND BLACK DISORDER IN THE FACE OF NEW CHALLENGES

When the National Party came to power in 1948 it set about stripping Coloureds and blacks of all vestiges of parliamentary rights. The system of what was called Native Representation in a white parliament was abolished and Coloureds were removed from the common voters' roll. Black South Africa responded to this hardened white political attitude with anger and the hard line polices of the National Party after 1948 further polarised society and drove blacks into ever more militant stances.

Black South African politics had been plagued with internal organisational conflicts and conflicts between organisations resulted in schism, after schism and the emergence and the disappearance of organisation after organisation. During the first two decades of the ANC's existence, a great deal of time and energy was spent working for black solidarity. After the great depression in the early thirties, the ANC emerged as the central black South African political organisation of the country. Black consensus which had established the ANC as the central black political organisation, was achieved only after many years of debate.

By the late 1950's the hard-won solidarity in black politics was in disarray. A clique among the younger members of the ANC, impatient with the movement's leadership and more racially conscious than their elders, rallied behind Robert Sobukwe to form the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress. The black anti-apartheid front so painfully formed was further fragmented as black South Africa reacted to the ever-increasingly harsh attitude of the National Party which had come to power in 1948.

Government action further polarised the country and the oppressive measures the National Party adopted to control black politics stung a wide range of black people into new levels of political activity. As black politics became more militant in the face of Government action, so new organisations emerged or existing organisations were challenged by minorities in them to adopt different tactics and strategies. A minority black opinion crystallised in which the ideals of working for the inclusion of blacks in the existing State were abandoned in favour of the ideals of working for the overthrow of the State and for its reformation under a black majority government.