1960–1961

South Africa had changed in those four months. The tension and confrontations, which five months before had felt like a prelude to revolution, were gone. They had left behind a deep gloom in the white middle class about the economy and the future.

The mood in the movement was more difficult to assess. The whole Congress scene had changed. The previously legal and open ANC had vanished, its offices closed and deserted, although it had promised not to disband but to continue underground. Its former office bearers and activists were back in town after months in prison or in hiding and were reconstituting their political inter-connections without the offices and facilities they had formerly known.

The modes of political activity were being re-invented to escape the law. Meetings which had once been public were starting up again, but secretively, behind closed doors and only with carefully selected participants. Security, secrecy and caution had become the watchwords of survival. They cast a furtive shadow over every chance or deliberate encounter.

Even in the still legal sectors of the movement, such as the Indian Congress, COD and SACTU, secretiveness was spreading like an infection. All of them tended to shrink unconsciously away from the limelight of publicity and were taking to semi-clandestine styles of work in order to remain within contact with the ANC, now underground. The party had been less strained in adapting itself to post-Emergency conditions. It had almost ten years’ experience of underground work behind it, during which not a single member had ever been successfully prosecuted for membership. For party members illegality had become the norm, and techniques of working within it had been practised and perfected.

Party modes of work had also undergone their own change since the Emergency. Ever since our start we had kept totally silent about the reconstitution of the party. There had been no public disclosures of any sort, no statements, no admissions by anyone of the party's existence or acknowledgement of membership of it. Yet everyone close to the movement seemed to have sensed that it was there, somewhere, and to have accepted that somehow it was exercising an influence.