21, 1960, when police opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters at a PAC anti-pass demonstration in Sharpeville, a black township south of Johannesburg. Riots ensued, and the government banned both the PAC and the ANC. Operating underground, Mandela and other ANC leaders concluded that the time had come to meet government violence with armed resistance. While ANC President Albert Luthuli refused to renounce pacifism, he gave permission for Mandela, Tambo, and longtime ANC associate and Communist Party leader Joe Slovo to form a separate paramilitary organization. Umkhonto we Sizwe, "the spear of the nation," was launched in December 1961.Although Umkhonto primarily committed acts of sabotage against South African industry and infrastructure, in 1962 its leaders began planning a guerrilla war, hoping to inspire a popular uprising that would topple the apartheid government. These plans were foiled when police raided Umkhonto's South African headquarters, at Rivonia. Evidence found there was used to convict Mandela and others of treason. Mandela, already in prison for inciting strikes, was given a life sentence and sent to Robben Island. Slovo, out of the country at the time of the raid, was forced into exile.With most of its leaders either exiled or imprisoned, in the 1960s the ANC entered a period of internal turmoil. Factions disputed the role of economic versus political liberation. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the ANC, now led by Oliver Tambo, was re-energized by both the student-led Black Consciousness movement and South Africa's increasingly militant labor unions. The Soweto uprising of 1976, sparked by a police massacre of protesting students, helped unite disparate antiapartheid elements and heal the generational rifts that had dogged the ANC. At the same time, the defeat of white-ruled regimes in Angola and Mozambique brought new hope that the battle against apartheid could be won.The government responded to the ANC's grow...
