For decades, apartheid South Africa seemed unshakable. Trevor Noah, former host of the Daily Show and native South African, described it as “perfect racism” – a system of subjugation based on the color of one’s skin that had been scientifically honed over centuries. A complete compendium of apartheid laws would run more than three thousand pages, all created to maintain power in the face of the country’s rising and restless black majority. 

To develop this system of total control, Noah writes, the South African government “set up a formal commission to go out and study institutionalized racism all over the world. They went to Australia. They went to the Netherlands. They went to America. They saw what worked, what didn’t. Then they came back and published a report, and the government used that knowledge to build the most advanced system of racial oppression known to man.”

Yet, against all odds in 1990 Nelson Mandela, the face of the anti-apartheid liberation movement, was released from prison, and just four years later was elected South Africa’s first black President. In his inaugural address, Mandela proclaimed “We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity.” Even ten years before, such a moment would have seemed impossible. 

There are many ways to tell the story of why this transformation took place. And there are many justified critiques of what has happened in the 30 years since. But I am here in South Africa because their story of Democracy is a compelling parable for the incredible potential and promise of community organizing. Against insurmountable odds, South Africans transformed their country not through civil war or a military coup, but by organizing in extremely bold and creative ways that developed popular power aimed at improving the conditions of everyday people. They did not topple a government, they revolutionized it.

Just like all good parables, the purpose of retelling this story is to remember the lessons it holds for the rest of us. 

This one begins with the apartheid state – a profound circumstance of injustice that many such stories begin with. But implied by this opening is the predicament it forces us to face: what do you do when opposed by an overwhelmingly powerful foe? 

Say, for example, that you are trying to tear down an old brick wall. How do you respond? Flailing away all day with your fists won't really do the trick. Shouting at it and trying to convince the wall that it is in the wrong and should really just demolish itself won’t either. 

So you figure out a way to even the odds. Either you increase your strength – by perhaps going to find a hammer or some friends – or you strategically weaken the structural integrity of the wall by chipping out a few bricks at the bottom so it’s easier to push over. Preferably you do both at the same time. And this is what they did so well in South Africa.

Part One: Finding a Hammer and some Friends

On August 20, 1983, 12,000 activists crowded into the Rocklands Civic Centre on the outskirts of Cape Town in the shadow of Table Mountain. Those present represented over four hundred community organizations that had come together from across the country. Organizations like the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization and the Kwazakhele Rugby Union stood alongside student organizations, churches, neighborhood associations, and all other manner of community groups. 

The mass meeting had been called in response to the announcement of a new draconian apartheid law to be added to the already burgeoning system. Their purpose was to form a new ‘organization of organizations’ that would be powerful enough to draw the apartheid government to the negotiating table and do something about it.  

Many of those community organizations present were already on the front lines of fighting the consequences of the apartheid system and had been for years. Be it a rugby league or student association, most had first hand experience picking up the pieces and pushing back when government failed to provide basic services like water and sanitation, electricity, or police protection. They were familiar with the feeling of trying to beat down the brick wall with their bare hands. 

Key among these grassroots groups were the ‘Civic Associations’ or ‘civics’ for short. Small, local democratic organizations, civics had emerged primarily in black townships across South Africa as a vehicle for those ignored by the state to make their voice heard. Civics were often built one street at a time by residents who argued that because the government was not able to provide for the community, the people would do it themselves. 

Though relatively small, civics punched above their weight in terms of impact on the local areas – especially when working together. Those associations in particularly violence prone neighborhoods often became especially involved in implementing safety procedures, setting up night watch crews with whistles who could wake up the neighborhood when there was trouble. Others took on creating sanitation systems when the government refused to install or repair water lines. When rents were raised in townships across Durban and Sowetu, residents stood firm behind their civic and engaged in mass rent strikes in campaigns that lasted multiple years.  

Under apartheid, Professor Elke Zuern writes, these civics “helped foster community solidarity in the struggle against apartheid and gave people a sense that they had control over their lives.” 

Imagine, then, the potential of 400+ such organizations working in unison. That was the vision of the 12,000 assembled delegates in Cape Town when they voted to create a new united front of community organizations that could bring their collective power to bear against the apartheid regime. They called this coalition the United Democratic Front (UDF), and rallied under the slogan: ‘UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides.' 

Within months, the membership had swelled to over 600 organizations and the UDF began to flex its political muscle. Facing some of the largest rent boycotts, school walkouts, and worker strikes in the country’s history, the brick wall of the apartheid government now found itself staring down a much more intimidating foe than before.

Alongside the UDF, South Africa’s unions and churches had undergone a similar process of organizing by uniting local, isolated groups into powerful national federations. Together, the UDF, national unions, and the newly created South African Council of Churches under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew millions of people into organized struggle. 

Throughout, the success of the UDF, the Unions, and the South African Council of Churches was only possible because they linked the fight for national liberation and the overthrow of the apartheid regime to the bread and butter issues facing people every day. They understood that there would be no constituency to fight for national liberation without campaigns to address material conditions on the ground. Political freedom is an abstract, starvation is not. 

There are many necessary critiques of these movements. Violence, both by the state and between everyday people was overwhelming throughout these years. Yet, it cannot be denied that together, these labor, faith, and civic groups built popular power at such an unprecedented scale and intensity that it ultimately pushed the apartheid state into a stalemate, checked by a power that could not be easily overcome. 

But even if people now had enough strength to lock the government in a grappling match rather than just being crushed, they were still far from being able to win the contest. 

Imagine how pointless it would be to gather all your friends together with hammers only to have them start pounding away haphazardly at different sections of the wall. You might open up a hole here and there, but you’ll get awfully tired pretty fast. So you target the foundations.

Part Two: Targeting the Foundations

In April of 1984, Archbishop Desmond Tutu made a provocative appeal to the international press. Published that day in the New York Times, it read: ''Our land is burning and bleeding and so I call on the international community to apply punitive sanctions against this government.” The first black bishop of Johannesburg and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was going for the jugular.

The two justifications for apartheid were that it was the best way of 1) ensuring social stability, and 2) achieving economic growth. The policies may have seemed harsh to some, but so long as the white community could count on the government to prevent conflict and keep their jobs safe, abandoning them for any other option posed too much of a risk.

So the UDF, the South African Council of Churches, the unions – often coordinated through the African National Congress (ANC) – made it their mission to undermine these foundations. 

Through international campaigns, delegates worked with other African countries, the United Nations, and finally US and EU governments to impose international sanctions on the South African state on a massive scale. 

They were smart. Instead of again haphazardly hammering at the wall by making broad, ill-defined demands like the complete rejection of trade with South Africa until ‘apartheid was overthrown’, organizers coordinated asks that were concrete and specific: release Mandela and other political prisoners unjustifiably imprisoned, unban organizations that speak for the people like the ANC, and stop the Program of Forced Removals that had evicted millions of black families and dumped them in reservation style ‘homelands’.

As pressure mounted, the President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, was forced to recognize the threat this economic instability created. Bowing to the pressure in 1990, he authorized Mandela’s release and legalized the ANC. The repeal of the legislation for the Forced Removals Program would follow the year later. 

Meanwhile, mass action made of people in coordinated protests, strikes, walkouts, and marches across the country made it increasingly clear that the desire for freedom had grown beyond the government's ability to repress. 

Campaigns organized black people to seek treatment at white only hospitals, gold miners in the West en masse began using the changing rooms reserved for whites, Desmond Tutu walked along the whites-only Strand beach as dozens of police and army officers held others back from holding a multi-racial “bathe-in.” 

The 6-year anniversary of the UDF’s founding was celebrated by the ANC in a public statement that congratulated UDF members for carrying “mass struggle to a new level.” 

The result was a government that had failed to deliver on its two most fundamental commitments: economic growth and social stability. The risk of maintaining the status-quo was no longer substantially less than the alternative. 

The truth of this was born out in 1992, when the government called a ‘whites-only’ referendum that asked white citizens if they supported continuing the process of dismantling apartheid. Across South Africa, billboards, televisions, and celebrity endorsements all delivered a stark message about what would happen if voters chose to cling to the apartheid system: white unemployment, renewed sanctions, and civil war. 

68.7% of those eligible to vote chose to turn their backs on the old system once and for all. 

When President F. W. de Klerk emerged to publicly declare the results, he announced definitively that “today we have closed the book on apartheid.” 

Popular power had shown that the apartheid regime was no longer the best option for keeping your family safe and putting food on the table. 

Conclusions

This is a complicated story. There are many important critiques you could make of what I have written to create a less ‘sanitized’ version of the struggle against apartheid. The reality is that millions of people were involved, organizations waxed and waned, leaders came and went, and the protagonists I’ve portrayed here were not always the ‘good guys’. But that’s how all parables work. What I hope this provides is a history in essence – not of good versus evil, but of how people overcame remarkable odds to create change. 

I was moved to write this piece because I have seen or actively been a part of too many political movements that thought they would win just because they were morally right. We thought that if we could get enough people shouting in unison, someone would be sure to listen. 

That is not how you tear down walls. 

The lesson from the struggle against apartheid is to bring just as much cunning and strategy to the table as your rival. Build strong, federated alliances rooted in the issues of everyday people, not high minded ideals. Understand your rival’s strength and where it comes from. And most importantly, build organizations that will be around for years to continue the fight. 

Not long before he was assassinated, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began teaching this lesson in earnest, worried that people would forget the key lessons of the Civil Rights movement. “Mass nonviolent demonstrations will not be enough," he argued. "They must be supplemented by a continuing job of organization. To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power... More and more, the civil rights movement will have to engage in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and produce change on their behalf. This task is tedious, and lacks the drama of demonstrations, but it is necessary for meaningful results." 

We would do well to remember this distinction between organizing and mobilizing in our historical imagination. Because if we are to make some progress on the hard road that lies ahead, there is an urgent need for us to resurrect such forms of popular organization in the present.