At its national conference in December 1960, the underground Communist Party reviewed the significance of the events of the State of Emergency earlier that year as well as how the emergency was experienced. Conference delegates remarked that the government had passed from the stage where it was attempting to control and combat the peoples’ movement by parliamentary-style rule whenever the government felt itself powerfully challenged. The Party concluded that in the light of such blatant repression, the people’s movement could no longer hope to continue along the road of exclusively non-violent forms of political struggle. It decided that the Central Committee should ‘take steps to initiate the training and equipping of selected personnel in new methods of struggle.’ These steps would thus prepare the nucleus of an adequate apparatus to lead struggles of a more forcible and violent character. This shift towards the ethos of violence was vital to the germination of Harry Gwala’s political militancy.
