Insurrectionism in South Africa : The Pan-Africanist congress and the Poqo movement, 1959-1965

The thesis discusses the history of a black South African
political organisation, the Pan-Africanist Congress during the
brief period of its effective influence inside South Africa:
from 1959 to the mid-1960s. The PAC is identified as a
populist movement, that is a movement of people who in one way
or another were attempting to resist the impulses of an
industrialising society. Its ideology therefore tended to
stress communal as opposed to class-bound social identities.
Beginning as a small dissident group within the dominant African
political organisation, the African National Congress, the PAC
was born after a decade of mass-based campaigning had distanced
the ANC from its earlier nationalist position. The PAC acquired
a following in only a few places, normally where its rival, the
ANC, was weak and badly organised. It only approached the
dimensions of a mass movement in the Western Cape where its
militant, racially assertive rhetoric attracted migrant workers
who were affected by a twin set of pressures: the efforts by
the authorities to exclude them from urban society and the
restructuring of their home communities in the Transkei. After
the PAC's banning in March 1960 these people began to play a
crucial role in transforming the organisation from a cluster of
conspiritorial nuclei drawn mainly from the middle class into the
popular movement Pogo, in the process injecting it with their own
material and ideological preoccupations. In 1963 the PAC's exile
leadership attempted to mobilise this following in a nation-wide
insurrection but most of their preparations were known to the
police who anticipated their plans with thousands of arrests
PAC-inspired violence was therefore localised and confined
mainly to the Transkei and the Western Cape. Two chapters
examine the local social tensions which underlay PAC/Pogo
violence in Paarl and the Tembu districts of the Southern
Transkei. By way of contrast the development of the movement
amongst a non-migrant constituency is examined in a chapter on
the PAC's progress in East London and Pretoria. The thesis
concludes with an examination of the PAC in exile: here
divorced from its popular base and from the political
environment which gave rise to its ideological concerns the
movement lost its vigour and integrity: a classic instance of
the tragedy of exile politics.