With the leadership of the liberation movement behind bars, the Rivonia Trial marked the beginning of the decade in which everything seemed to be going the white government's way. Resistance was stifled, the state grew more powerful and for white South Africans, businessmen and foreign investors life seemed perfect. The panic caused by the Sharpeville massacre soon became a dim memory and confidence returned. For black South Africans, poverty deepened - a state of affairs enforced by apartheid legislation.
There was a minor setback in 1966 when Dr Verwoerd was stabbed to death (and failed to return from the dead this time) in parliament by a messenger who went off the rails after a tapeworm had ordered him to do it, as he told doctors. The breach was filled by John Vorster , whose approach was more pragmatic than that of Verwoerd. Not averse to travelling to Africa to shake hands with tame black leaders like Hastings Banda of Malawi in the interests of detente, his approach to black South Africans was rather less chummy. His premiership was characterized by an increased use of the police as an instrument of repression, while bannings, detentions without trial, house arrests and deaths of political prisoners in detention became commonplace.
The ANC was impotent, and resistance by its armed wing MK was virtually nonexistent. This was partly because up to the mid-1970s South Africa was surrounded by sympathetic white regimes - in neighbouring Rhodesia and Mozambique - making it close to impossible to infiltrate combatants into the country. But as South Africa swung into the 1970s, the uneasy peace began to fray, prompted at first by deteriorating black living standards , which reawakened industrial action. Trade unions came to fill the vacuum left by the ANC and neither Vorster nor any of his National Party successors proved able to stem the escalation of strikes, despite all the repressive resources at their disposal.
However, it was the Soweto Revolt of June 16, 1976, that signalled the transfer of protest from the workplace to the townships, when black youths took to the streets in protest against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools. The protest spread across the country after police opened fire and killed thirteen-year-old Hector Peterson during one march. By the following February, 575 people (nearly a quarter of them children) had been killed in the rolling series of revolts that followed.
Even in the face of naked violence, protest spread to all sections of the community. The government was forced to rely increasingly on armed police to impose order. Even this was unable to stop the mushrooming of new liberation organizations, many of them part of the broadly based Black Consciousness Movement . As the unrest rumbled on into 1977, the Vorster government responded by banning all the new black organizations and detaining their leadership. In September 1977, Steve Biko (one of the detained), became the 46th political prisoner to meet his end in jail at the hands of the security police. In place of the banned organizations, a fresh crop had sprung up by the end of the 1970s. The government never again successfully put the lid on opposition which escalated through the 1980s. There were rent, bus and school boycotts, strikes and campaigns against removals. By the end of the decade, business was complaining that apartheid wasn't working any more, and even the government was starting to agree. The growth of the black population was outstripping that of whites; from a peak of 21 percent of the population in 1910, whites now made up only 16 percent. This proportion was set to fall to 10 percent by the end of the century. The sums just didn't add up.
