The back of black political resistance was broken – albeit temporarily – after the banning of the ANC and PAC, and those political activists who managed to evade the police net were forced to operate underground. Many more fled the country and joined MK or Poqo in exile. This turn of events caused the National Party government to believe that it had normalised the political situation, a sense enhanced by the economic boom of the 1960s, when foreign investment flooded into the country and the annual rate of economic growth rose to 9.3 per cent. Job opportunities opened up, and as many black people found employment their focus shifted from politics to making a living.

The black residents of Kroonstad also benefitted from this economic boom. At the close of the 1960s, a significant number were employed. By then, Setiloane writes: ‘Kroonstad town had grown tremendously. There were more shops, more garages, more restaurants, more hotels and more suburbs. Factories which were non-existent in the 1930s and 1940s had now sprung up. Job opportunities were numerous. People could also find employment in the police force, the prison department and at the municipal offices.’

In spite of the barrage of suppressive laws passed by the government during this period to intimidate black people, and the economic boom which deflected the political momentum of the late 1950s, a few people, operating clandestinely, attempted to resuscitate opposition politics and to conscientise the younger generation. These attempts, however, were disrupted. First, many of the adult activists who were part of the secret meetings fled into exile. Second, some of the young people left Kroonstad to further their studies at tertiary institutions.

In the 1960s the government created ethnically divided university colleges to take the edge off black opposition politics, but this had unintended consequences. Instead of producing docile and apolitical university graduates who would go on to develop their different homelands, the atmosphere at these universities helped to develop the students’ political awareness. In the early 1970s these students played a pivotal role in politicising secondary and high school students who, in 1976, took to the streets to challenge the government. In Kroonstad, students and graduates from the University of the North (also known as Turfloop), using the black consciousness (BC) philosophy, played an instrumental role in reviving protest politics after the ‘lull’ decade of the 1960s.