ABSTRACT
The decolonisation of Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, and the conflict in Namibia, had changed the regional context of South African politics. Moreover, after nearly twenty years of sustained growth the domestic economy began declining quite dramatically from the mid-1970s. Major riots took place in the urban areas in 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1985, punctuating an almost continuously escalating wave of strikes, stay-aways, and boycotts. In the homelands and national states, the ostensibly self-governing territories which the Nationalist government had formed as part of its policy of separate development, there was a marked increase in worker and community action on the one hand, and state repression on the other. The reforms which the state introduced during the 1970s and 1980s were concentrated in the major urban industrial areas, where resistance had the most immediate disruptive effect on economic and social relations, and directly tested the state’s repressive capacity.
