Shift to Sabotage

Mandela was very risky in switching to a position of violence directly after the Treason trial, in which they were working hard to confirm that the ANC was a nonviolent organization. When a person quickly switches a position on an issue, often times the legitimacy and the trust of that person can be lost because it becomes unclear where the person stands on a topic. But going through the struggles of the Treason Trial, Mandela had come to realize that their non-violent has not accomplished or progressed them in their movement to end apartheid. And Africans were dying, often times protesting peacefully. If they were to stick to a non-violent approach, Mandela believed freedom could be achieved, but probably not in his lifetime.

Switching to a violent approach for the ANC officially makes Mandela fighter. It was interesting to see that Mandela did not want to be blindly violent but researched and analyzed guerrilla tactics from leaders like Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro. It shows that Mandela wanted to be an effective leader by learning from the trials and errors of other leaders.

Often times when a organization takes a new approach to tackling a problem it is often a trial and error method until they know what is best for them. But for the ANC’s case, they had done enough research to realize that if they were going to go with a violent approach, it would be through sabotage. Sabotage reduces the chance of loss of life and it did not an army of people to accomplish this task. If the ANC went with some type of war to terrorist acts, supporters of the ANC may rescind their backing of an organization that has started to become reckless. An approach of sabotage allowed staunch supports of nonviolence to slowly ease into this approach by convincing that this type of violence causes the least harm to human life but is still highly effective.