Where "Become Ungovernable" Came From
Quick Answer
Become ungovernable did not start as an internet slogan. The phrase comes from the African National Congress. Oliver Tambo called for South Africa to be made "increasingly ungovernable" in a broadcast from Lusaka on 8 January 1984, repeated it in an October 1984 Radio Freedom address titled "Make South Africa ungovernable," and issued it again on 8 January 1985 as "Render South Africa Ungovernable." Thabo Mbeki, his political secretary and speechwriter, is credited with the wording. The American version of the phrase appeared in November 2016, after the presidential election.
In 1988 a South African court convicted three men of treason for making the country ungovernable. The Delmas Treason Trial ran for years and the finding was that leaders of the United Democratic Front had pursued a deliberate policy of ungovernability. The slogan was the evidence.
Thirty years later it was a hoodie.
Lusaka, 8 January 1984
You would assume become ungovernable started online. It started on shortwave radio.
Oliver Tambo led the ANC in exile. Every January 8, on the anniversary of the organization's founding, he broadcast a statement from Lusaka. In the 1984 statement he said South Africa should be made increasingly ungovernable, and set out attacking the organs of the apartheid state as the method.
He went back to it repeatedly. A Radio Freedom broadcast on 10 October 1984 was titled "Make South Africa ungovernable." The 8 January 1985 statement, marking the ANC's seventy-third anniversary, was titled "Render South Africa Ungovernable." On 22 July 1985 he put it as making apartheid unworkable and the country ungovernable.
Mark Gevisser credits the formulation to Thabo Mbeki, who was Tambo's political secretary and speechwriter at the time and who later became president. The most-printed protest slogan of the last decade was most likely drafted by a staffer.
There is an earlier use. In 1971 the Irish republican Ruairí Ó Brádaigh argued Sinn Féin should make Northern Ireland ungovernable. The idea was in the air. South Africa is where it got a campaign attached.
Rent boycotts and people's courts
Ungovernable was not a mood. It was a list of specific things to stop doing.
Residents refused to pay rent and refused to pay for services. Students boycotted the Bantu Education schools. Black local authorities set up by the apartheid government were rejected outright, and the councillors who staffed them resigned or fled. Unions ran mass labor action.
Then came the part that made the courts nervous. Townships built replacements. Street committees handled disputes. People's courts heard cases. Communities were not only withdrawing from the state's institutions, they were standing up their own, which is a much harder thing to prosecute and a much harder thing to undo.
The Vaal uprising started in September 1984 and spread across the country. By the ANC's Kabwe conference in July 1985, ungovernability had been folded into a declared strategy for seizure of power.
The part that does not fit on a shirt
Most historians who have looked at it say the ANC did not cause the uprising. The boycotts and the demonstrations were already running, organized by the UDF and local civic groups, and the broadcasts from Lusaka mostly endorsed what people were already doing. Tambo named it. The townships had started it.
The campaign also produced things nobody puts on merchandise. Suspected collaborators were killed by their neighbors, including by necklacing, and in a December 1986 interview the MK commissar Chris Hani spoke sympathetically about it as a method of making an area ungovernable. Graeme Simpson and Anthea Jeffery have both argued the strategy left behind a damaged relationship with authority that outlived apartheid.
Apartheid ended. Both of those things are in the record.
198 methods, catalogued
The strategy has a textbook. Gene Sharp wrote From Dictatorship to Democracy in 1993 at the request of an exiled Burmese democrat, Tin Maung Win, and ran it in installments out of Bangkok. Its first appendix lists 198 specific methods of nonviolent action, pulled from his 1973 book, and the whole thing rests on one claim: a government runs on the cooperation of the people it governs, and it stops working when enough of them stop cooperating.
Read the list and the South African campaign is sitting right there. Rent withholding. School boycotts. Refusal to recognize officials. Setting up parallel institutions. Tambo was not improvising a mood. He was naming a known toolkit.
Sharp's version excludes the violence, which South Africa did not. The book has been translated into more than thirty languages and the Serbian movement Otpor used it as a manual around 2000.
November 2016
The American version shows up almost overnight, and the dates are tight.
On 9 November 2016, the day after the presidential election, a Twitter user posted that it was time to be ungovernable. On 10 November the Ramps Campaign quoted the organizer Noah Morris saying he urged people to become ungovernable. Cory Doctorow published a piece on Boing Boing on 2 January 2017 called "2017: the year we become ungovernable," built on an interview with the organizer Kali Akuno.
A site at ungovernable2017.com organized a national day of action for 20 January. The phrase turned up on signs at the Oakland Women's March on 21 January and at the San Francisco airport protests on 29 January. By 4 February a Tumblr user had posted a "Be Ungovernable" poster that cleared twelve hundred likes and reblogs.
Almost nobody using it in 2016 cited Lusaka. The phrase arrived in American politics stripped of where it came from, which is what happens to good slogans, and the same thing happened to No Kings.
From treason charge to image macro
The slogan then did what phrases do online. It got funny. Know Your Meme catalogs the image macro era, which includes "I was told I could become anything I wanted so I became ungovernable" and a run of jokes pairing the phrase with mundane rule-breaking.
People get sniffy about that, and the complaint usually lands on anarchists, who did not write it either. Anarchism has its own long record and a definition most people get wrong. This particular phrase came out of a national liberation movement with an army, a radio station and a legal department.
In 2022 a man was suspended from Facebook for thirty days for posting that sometimes one must become ungovernable. In 1988 three men were convicted of treason for the same sentence.
We made Become Ungovernable with the receipts attached. It runs with the ANTIFA tee, and the rest of the activism collection is for the other phrases people think started on the internet.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does "become ungovernable" mean?
Withdrawing cooperation from a government to the point that it cannot function. In its original use it meant a specific program: refusing to pay rent and service charges, boycotting state schools, rejecting government-appointed local councils, and building parallel institutions like street committees and community courts to replace them. The modern usage is looser and usually means refusing to comply rather than organized mass noncooperation.
Where did the phrase "become ungovernable" come from?
The African National Congress. Oliver Tambo called for South Africa to be made increasingly ungovernable in his January Eighth Statement broadcast from Lusaka in 1984, and repeated it through 1985 in Radio Freedom addresses titled "Make South Africa ungovernable" and "Render South Africa Ungovernable." Mark Gevisser credits the wording to Thabo Mbeki, then Tambo's speechwriter.
Is "become ungovernable" an anarchist slogan?
It gets filed that way, but no. It came from a national liberation movement with an armed wing, a government in exile and a radio station. Anarchists adopted it later, along with everyone else.
When did Americans start saying it?
November 2016, within days of the presidential election. The hashtag appeared on 9 November and the full phrase on 10 November, attributed to the organizer Noah Morris. Cory Doctorow's "2017: the year we become ungovernable" ran on 2 January 2017, and the phrase was on protest signs by late January.
Did making South Africa ungovernable work?
Apartheid ended, though historians generally credit the township uprising that was already underway rather than the broadcasts that named it. The campaign also drew sustained criticism for the violence that came with it, including the killing of suspected collaborators. In 1988 three United Democratic Front leaders were convicted of treason in the Delmas Treason Trial for pursuing the policy.
What was the Delmas Treason Trial?
A South African treason case that ended in 1988 with the conviction of three UDF leaders, on a finding that they had pursued a policy designed to render the country ungovernable.
