On March 21, 1960, Sobukwe and thousands of followers left home to present themselves without passes to police stations. Sobukwe gave strict instructions to keep the demonstrations peaceful and not to be provoked by anyone. Across Gauteng and the Western Cape there were demonstrations which in due course dispersed, but at
Sharpeville police station, south of Johannesburg, the crowd refused to leave, despite being buzzed by low-flying Sabre jets. A scuffle broke out, the police panicked and opened fire, killing 69 and injuring nearly 200. Most were shot in the back.
In a rapid sequence of events, demonstrations swept the country on March 27 , and ANC activist Oliver Tambo (later to become the ANC leader in exile until the release of Mandela) illegally left the country. The following day, Africans staged a total stay-away from work and thousands followed Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli in a public pass-burning demonstration. The day after that, the government declared a state of emergency and rounded up 22,000 people. One day later, the United Nations Security Council resolution called for the government to abandon apartheid, to which it reacted swiftly with bans on the ANC and PAC. It was now illegal to be a member of either organization. Among white South Africans there was near hysteria as the value of the rand slipped, shares slumped and some feared an imminent and bloody revolution.
Later that month, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was shot twice in the head by a half-crazed white farmer and many people hoped his death would provide a speedy retreat from apartheid. But Dr Verwoerd survived, with his prestige enhanced and his appetite for apartheid stronger than ever. More than anyone else, Verwoerd made apartheid his own and formulated it into a coherent system based around the idea of notionally independent bantustans , in which Africans were to exercise their political rights away from the white areas. The underlying aim of the scheme was to divide Africans into distinct ethnic groups, thereby dismantling the black majority into several separate "tribal" minorities, none of which on its own could outnumber whites.
After the banning of opposition in 1960, Dr Verwoerd pressed ahead with his cherished dream of an all-white Afrikaner republic , which he succeeded in achieving in March 1961 through a referendum. For his pains, the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference in London kicked the republic out of the British Commonwealth and Mandela called for a national convention "to determine a non-racial democratic constitution". Instead, Verwoerd appointed one-time neo-nazi John Vorster to the post of justice minister. A trained lawyer, Vorster eagerly set about passing a succession of repressive laws that circumvented normal legal procedures and flouted all principles of natural justice.
Some in the ANC realized that the rules of the game had changed irrevocably. "The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit", Mandela told the world, before going underground as commander-in-chief of UmkhontoWe Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, aka MK), a newly formed armed wing involving ANC and Communist Party leaders. The organization was dedicated to economic and symbolic acts of sabotage and was under strict orders not to kill or injure people. Mandela operated clandestinely for a year, travelling in disguise, leaving the country illegally and popping up unexpectedly at meetings - all of which earned him the nickname, the "Black Pimpernel". In August 1962, he was finally arrested, tried and imprisoned. He was let out again briefly in 1963 to defend himself against charges of treason at the Rivonia Trial . Mandela and nine other ANC leaders were all found guilty and handed life sentences.
