Ebook: Conscripts To Their Age: African National Congress Operational Strategy, 1976-1986

There was a consistency to ANC operational strategy between 1976 and 1986 even when there was a change in tactics. The ANC always treated armed struggle as the central feature of its operational strategy, the ultimate aim of which was the forcible overthrow of the South African state. As a result, military imperatives invariably dictated the form the ANC sought to give to its political deployments.

The ANC's armed struggle remained at a very low level of intensity, however, and posed no military threat to the South African state. A determination to correct this weakness motivated most ANC attempts to reshape operational structures and political mobilisation. By the mid-1980s, however, the ANC's armed struggle was, patently, a military failure. Moreover, political mobilisation by political means, much of it initially undertaken to bolster armed struggle, posed a more serious challenge to the state than armed struggle. Yet the ANC persisted with its armed struggle, and its operational strategy still accorded armed force the crucial role in securing fundamental change in South Africa.