At the conclusion of a three-day meeting held in December 1968 at St Francis’ College, the Catholic high school in Mariannhill, half-way between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, a group of black students – representing ‘Non-white Universities, University Colleges, Seminaries, Training Colleges and other centres of higher learning’ – announced their decision to launch a new student movement.

The students stated that although they agreed that it was ‘ideal that any country should have one National Student Organisation, and that such an Organisation should cater for the interests of all the students of the country’, they also agreed that NUSAS was not that organisation.

They accused the existing union of no wrongdoing, but simply identified ‘circumstances beyond [its] control’ that limited its effectiveness – namely, that ‘students at some Non-white Centres are unable to participate in the National Student Union of this country.’ Therefore, they added,

For all its apparent modesty, this declaration was revolutionary.

It marked the first attempt of black students to assert their own political and social agency after the suppression of the aboveground organisations of the 1940s and 1950s. SASO would become a national union for black students, an alternative to NUSAS – with, significantly, a far clearer source of legitimacy. It would represent the political aspirations of black students as defined by black students, as articulated by black students and as fought for by black students, and not, as had previously been the case, by those few white students who wished to represent them. In doing so, SASO would articulate a new philosophy – Black Consciousness – that sought to place the experiences of men and women of colour at the centre of political, cultural and social developments. These ideas would soon reshape South Africa's political worlds.

But they would not do so in the measured tones of this first statement.