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Why did leaders of the Congress movement in South Africa abandon their exclusive reliance on non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid, form an armed unit (Umkhonto we Sizwe), and launch a campaign of spectacular sabotage bombings of symbols of apartheid in 1961? None of the earlier violent struggles from which Congress leaders drew inspiration, and none of the contemporaneous insurgencies against white minority rule elsewhere in southern Africa, involved a similar distinct, preliminary and extended phase of non-lethal symbolic sabotage. Following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, Congress leaders feared the social and political consequences of increased popular enthusiasm for using violence. Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and the other founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe did not launch their sabotage campaign because they believed it would prompt a change of heart among white South Africans, nor because they believed urban sabotage bombings were a necessary prelude to the launch of rural guerrilla warfare. Rather, the sabotage campaign was a spectacular placeholder, a stopgap intended to advertise the Congress movement's abandonment of exclusive non-violence and thus to discourage opponents of apartheid, both inside and outside South Africa, from supporting rival groups or initiating ‘uncontrolled violent action themselves.

The Carter administration's adoption of an approach towards the South African government's policy of apartheid that was, as Jimmy Carter put it, “correct but as easy on them as possible,” cannot be explained solely by American economic and strategic interests in the region or by the administration's desire for South Africa's cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation and the resolution of the conflicts in neighboring Rhodesia and Namibia. The lessons Carter and Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young drew from their earlier personal experiences in the American South in the 1960s were also of great significance. Those experiences not only gave Carter and Young a strong commitment to ending apartheid in South Africa but also strongly influenced the ways in which they thought that objective might be achieved. First, Carter and Young had considerable sympathy for the position of white South Africans and were concerned to work with them toward peaceful change in a spirit of cooperation rather than confrontation. Second, they believed that American businesses could have a positive impact on race relations in South Africa. They therefore encouraged American investors to adopt “enlightened employment practices,” and resisted pressure from anti-apartheid activists to impose economic sanctions.