The government had hoped that co-opting coloureds and Indians as junior partners of the apartheid state, as well as facilitating a settled urban African population with access to an industrial relations machinery, would create the conditions for political stability and economic recovery. Instead, the UDF pushed back against state control in many townships and began establishing alternative forms of power.

The government responded by declaring a partial state of emergency covering key areas in the country on 22 July 1985, the first since 1960. On 24 July, two days after the emergency was declared, Oliver Tambo called on South Africans to ‘make apartheid unworkable and the country ungovernable’. The partial state of emergency expired on 7 March 1986, but as resistance continued, the state of emergency was implemented nationwide on 12 June 1986 and would continue in Natal until October 1990.

The state of emergency served as a lightning rod for dissent and confrontation. Protests grew more violent, and consumer boycotts and other grassroots resistance intensified. While the state of emergency acted to escalate the anti-apartheid struggle, it also brought to the surface conflicts with deep roots in the histories of local communities, including racial tensions in Inanda, and led to the arrest of large numbers of activists. Under these circumstances, the NIC found it difficult to maintain the support it had enjoyed among Indians in the first half of the 1980s. Moreover, its internal divisions would become public and its organisational weaknesses exposed.

Violent protests that drew in workers, students and the unemployed erupted throughout South African townships. They were sparked by myriad issues that included low wages, high levels of unemployment and exorbitant transportation costs. Robert Price labels these protests an ‘insurrection’, such was the ferocity of the revolt against apartheid authority. Fatima Meer placed young people at the heart of the ‘ insurrection’ in African townships: