In 1960, demonstrators protesting against pass laws were killed and injured by police at Sharpeville. Soon afterwards, the apartheid government declared a state of emergency. Over 11 000 political activists were detained, and repressive new laws, police raids, arrests, bannings, and torture were used to crush political opposition to apartheid. The African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned, and many leaders of the ANC and PAC were arrested and imprisoned, and hundreds fled into exile.

For many white South Africans, the rest of the 1960s were a time of economic boom, political calm, prosperity, and rising living standards. Some blacks took the opportunity to accumulate wealth, power, and privilege through the Bantustans that the apartheid government established as part of its separate development programme. For most blacks, it was a period of great economic exploitation, extensive political and social control, fear, and demoralisation. It was difficult to see how there could be any political challenge to white minority rule. Anti-apartheid organisations faced immediate repression. They also had to overcome black people's fear and demoralisation, which stood in the way of mobilising opposition against apartheid.

The emergence of the South African Students’ Organisation and Black Consciousness

Despite many problems, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was formed as an exclusively black university and college student organisation in 1968. It escaped immediate state repression, and developed a following among students at the universities reserved for blacks. Thereafter, the ideology of Black Consciousness (BC) was developed and other BC organisations were formed, resulting in the BC movement.

SASO saw its challenge as the ‘assertion, manifestation and development of a sense of awareness politically, socially and economically among the black community’. It emphasised black ‘group cohesion and solidarity’ as ‘important facets of Black Consciousness’, the need for ‘the totality of involvement of the oppressed people’, and for BC ‘to be spread to reach all sections of the black community’. SASO began community development, literacy, education, media, culture, and sports projects, which aimed to help black communities to determine and realise their own needs. They were seen as a means to win the trust of people and to educate and mobilise them. Projects instilled the idea of self-reliance, seen as important for achieving freedom, in members and communities.