Politics of human rights, transformation and inclusion or assimilation were replaced with what participants called politics of “ungovernability” and “people’s power.” Ungovernability and people’s power discourse and praxes were understood as means towards the deconstruction of colonial-apartheid and the construction of a new polity based on Ubuntu/humanness, participatory democracy and social justice. These uprisings were revolutionary in the sense that Indigenous people did not seek to transform the colonial polity so that they could be included in it. Indeed, the 1980s, in my opinion, was the most revolutionary period in the history of 20th century anti-colonial politics in South Africa. These revolts were the biggest and most sustained challenge that colonized people ever mounted against colonialism and apartheid. In the mid-1980s, a desperate colonial regime in so-called “South Africa” declared a State of Emergency to squash unprecedented nationwide uprisings. Tshepo Madlingozi recounts this era through the particular history of the United Democratic Front formed in 1983. In South Africa, successive states of emergency were declared in the 1980s by the settler colonial apartheid regime to crush the uprisings initiated in the late 1970s.
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