Popular opposition to apartheid, 1950-1990

This dissertation investigates how black South Africans managed to organize resistance to a point where they won control of the government. How was this "negotiated revolution" possible given the apartheid state's enormous repressive capacity? I argue that the causes of upheaval in South Africa are so numerous that the search for final causes is misguided. South Africa's revolutionary situation, like many others, was generated by so many grievances that it is does an injustice to the evidence to attribute explanatory weight to a small set of variables. Rather than focusing on causality, I ask two related questions: why did opposition take the forms it did, and how did it change over time? The answers to these questions explain why black resistance was only able to mount an effective challenge to the state in the 1980s, despite decades of tenacious struggles.;I explain the varied forms of resistance to apartheid with a theoretical framework derived from Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony. I argue that the early years of mass resistance to apartheid were deeply shaped by the hegemony of white liberalism and apartheid notions of race. This hegemony was evident in popular and elite levels within the resistance in the 1950s; only in the early 1960s did the opposition attempt to move to a more radical counter-hegemony. I show that this counter-hegemony was quietly nurtured in the 1960s, and expressed aggressively in the 1970s through black consciousness ideology. By the early 1980s, I argue, this radicalism was evident throughout black South Africa. The revival of the African National Congress (ANC) in this period shifted the counter-hegemony in a more racially-inclusive direction, presenting the state with a formidable popular front. This radicalism, combined with persistent material pressures, led to popular insurrection and eventually negotiations with between the ANC and the government. To the extent that there was a genuine "revolution" in South Africa, it was possible only when organized resistance rejected all aspects of white hegemony and developed a viable counter-hegemony.