The UDF played a pre-eminent role in opposing apartheid and hastening its demise. Activists from the NIC and the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC) were central in the formation of this national front designed to broaden and deepen resistance to the apartheid state. Spurred by the Nationalists’ reform drive, the UDF's influence spread across the country. While it captured headlines for its national campaigns, the UDF was crucial in spawning street-level structures in townships that were at the heart of grassroots struggles.

Trevor Manuel recounted that the idea for the UDF emerged during his meeting with Pravin Gordhan on a visit to Durban in December 1982: ‘We were talking about civics and the question that arose was, what is the next step? [Pravin Gordhan] said, why don't we go for a broad front, a kind of united front? … The trick was to take the social capital on the ground [and] “somehow extract political capital out of it”.’

The two agreed to make the call for such a federation at a forthcoming conference in Johannesburg in January 1983, to revive the TIC. Twenty years later, Gordhan said that the increased activism in the 1980−1983 period lent itself ‘to the intensification of internal, so-called legal, mass activity and clearly anybody watching that from within or outside the country would be asking the question: how do you strategically take that forward?’

In a 1988 interview Jerry Coovadia observed that the UDF was possible only because so many community-based struggles had taken place in the period following the Soweto uprising. This grassroots organising prepared the ground for the UDF, which ‘had to be a federation of these many groups; tactically, it would be harder for the government to contain or ban a welter of groups, even if they banned the UDF itself’.

Several NIC activists, interviewed at different times, corroborated Manuel's account, albeit with slight differences of emphasis. In the Transvaal, although the TIC had not yet been revived, the Transvaal Anti- SAIC Committee (TASC) was formed under the leadership of Dr Essop Jassat in June 1981. The possibility of calling for a united front was raised at the 1983 TASC conference.Thumba Pillay recalled: