Challenge and Violence deals with the crucial period of the 1950s and early 1960s. These were years of mass passive resistance to apartheid; years when the ANC was able to rally hundreds of thousands of supporters for its strategy of non-violent protest. This was the period when the increasingly brutal repressive measures of the state, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC and PAC, finally turned the movement away from its proud tradition of nonviolence into the difficult and protracted path of armed struggle. “An enduring resource for historians of South Africa, scholars interested in revolutionary thought and practice, and students concerned with the interplay between violent and nonviolent strategies for social change.”