In 1944, a young hothead called Nelson Mandela got together with his friends Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu under the leadership of Anton Lembede to form the ANC Youth League . Strict Africanists, they refused to work with any other organizations - such as the Indian Congress. The League's founding manifesto criticized the ANC leadership as a group who regarded themselves as "gentlemen with clean hands". Lembede's radical brand of politics was based on his idea that "Africa is the black man's country". He continued: "We have inhabited Africa, our motherland, from time immemorial. Africa belongs to us."

 

The 1945 annual conference of the ANC adopted a document called " Africans' Claims in South Africa ", which reflected an emerging politicization resulting from the experiences of the war and especially the defeat of fascism. The document demanded universal franchise and an end to the colour bar , which reserved most skilled jobs for whites. The Youth League was influenced by the industrial militancy it had witnessed during the war. Despite a ban on industrial action, between 1942 and 1944 there were sixty strikes. In 1946 the African Mineworkers' Union launched one of the biggest strikes in the country's history in protest against falling living standards. Virtually the entire Gauteng gold-mining region came to a standstill as 100,000 workers downed tools. Smuts sent in police who forced the workers back down the shafts at gunpoint.

In 1947, the ANC Youth League was thrown into confusion when Lembede died suddenly. He was succeeded by A.P. Mda , and Nelson Mandela took his first step into public life when he was elected general secretary of the organization. At the same time, the Smuts government was under pressure for change. Meanwhile, European decolonization was beginning in earnest, with Britain withdrawing from India in the same year. This seemed to have implications for political rights for black South Africans. But more important still was demography, with the relentless influx of Africans into the urban areas breaking the traditional stereotype of them as rural tribespeople.

For years, the white government had been hinting at easing up on segregation, and even Smuts himself, who was no soft liberal, had reckoned that it was untenable and would have to end at some point. His deputy, J.H. Hofmeyr , had thrown caution to the winds and committed himself to scrapping job reservation, which excluded blacks from skilled jobs. "I take my stand on the ultimate removal of the colour bar", he went on record as saying. Playing for time, the government appointed the Fagan Commission to look into the question of the Pass Laws, which controlled the movement of Africans and sought to keep them out of the white cities unless they had a job. The laws led to millions of black South Africans being condemned to a ghetto existence in the rural areas, where there were no jobs, poverty reigned and infant mortality was high.

When the Fagan Commission reported its findings its 1948, it concluded that "the trend to urbanization is irreversible and the Pass Laws should be eased". While some blacks may have felt heartened by this hint of reform, this was the last thing many whites wanted to hear. For Afrikaners, the threat seemed particularly acute, and raised all sorts of fears about losing their identity and being swamped by blacks. For white workers , the threat of losing their jobs to lower-paid African workers was a real one, while Afrikaner farmers were alarmed by the idea of a labour shortage due to Africans leaving the rural areas for better prospects in the cities.

Against this background of black aspiration and white fears, the Smuts government called a general election . The opposition National Party campaigned on a swart gevaar or "black peril" ticket which played on white insecurity and fear. The Afrikaner nationalists promised to satisfy a range of conflicting interests. With an eye on the vote of Afrikaner workers and farmers, they promised to reverse the tide of Africans coming into the cites and send them all back to the reserves. For white business they made the conflicting promise to bring black workers into the cities as a cheap and plentiful supply of labour.

On Friday May 28, 1948, South Africa awoke to the unthinkable reality of a National Party victory at the (whites-only) polls. Party leader D.F. Malan was summoned to Pretoria by the governor-general to form a cabinet. On arriving by train at Pretoria station he told a group of ecstatic supporters: "For the first time, South Africa is our own. May God grant that it always remains our own. We Afrikaners are not a work of Man, but a creation of God. It is to us that millions of barbarous blacks look for guidance, justice and the Christian way of life."

Meanwhile, the ANC was riven by its own power struggle. Fed up with the ineffectiveness of the old guard, and faced with the rabid D.F. Malan, the Youth League staged a putsch, voted in their own leadership with Nelson Mandela on the executive and adopted the League's radical Programme of Action , with an arsenal of tactics that Mandela explained would include "the new weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation".