The South African Students' Organisation (SASO) was a body of black South African university students who resisted apartheid through non-violent political action. The organisation was formed in 1969 under the leadership of Steve Biko and Barney Pityana and made vital contributions to the ideology and political leadership of the Black Consciousness Movement. It was banned by the South African government in October 1977, as part of the repressive state response to the Soweto uprising.

The founding members of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) were black students from the University of Fort Hare, the University of Zululand, the University of the North at Turfloop, the so-called Black Section of the University of Natal (UNB), various theological seminaries and teacher training colleges, and other institutions of higher education in South Africa, which at the time were segregated under the apartheid-era Bantu Education Act. However, SASO has its roots in two other student organisations, which had emerged as focal points for student-led resistance to apartheid during the heightened state repression of the 1960s. The first was the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), the main nationwide progressive students' union, with a decades-long history of political activism. The second was the University Christian Movement (UCM), an ecumenical students' association which, partly because of the growing influence of black theology, attracted a membership of politically inclined black Christians. Both NUSAS and the UCM were multiracial, but their membership and leadership were dominated by white students, a major point of concern for some black members. In the case of NUSAS, the black students in question also disagreed politically with white liberals in the organisation, who at the time outnumbered those advocating for a more radical stance on apartheid.

At the 1968 NUSAS conference in Grahamstown, black students broke off to discuss separately the problems facing black students and the best means by which to address them. However, according to a SASO memorandum, SASO definitively began to take shape at a similar breakaway from the UCM conference in July of the same year, held in Stutterheim. There, the memo recalls, "a group of about 40 blacks ... resolved themselves into a black caucus and debated the possibility of forming a black students organisation". The meeting was attended and spearheaded by Steve Biko and Barney Pityana, who, in that order, were later to become SASO's first two presidents. After another consultative meeting organised by UNB students in December 1968, SASO was officially launched in July 1969 at its inaugural conference, held at the Turfloop campus of the University of the North, where its constitution was ratified. In subsequent years, SASO evaded serious state repression, at least initially, and its membership grew on black campuses across South Africa, from a base of fourteen branches (four in seminaries, and the largest at Turfloop) in June 1970. Its main office was located in Durban.

According to its 1971 policy manifesto:

SASO is a Black Student Organisation working for the liberation of the Black man first from the psychological oppression by themselves through inferiority complex and secondly from physical oppression accruing out of living in a White racist society.

SASO's establishment coincided with the earliest stirrings of the Black Consciousness Movement, which was perhaps the most important anti-apartheid force inside South Africa for much of the 1970s, and with which it was strongly aligned. The development of SASO is often viewed as coterminous with the development of the broader movement and its ideology. Indeed, according to sociologist Saleem Badat, the movement was "largely the achievement of SASO", which contributed its key ideas and intellectuals, and which provided the movement with its ideological, political, and organisational leadership. Accordingly, SASO actively encouraged the formation of other Black Consciousness groups to represent segments of civil society beyond university students, and it cooperated closely with those groups in line with its ideals of black cohesion and solidarity. Allied groups included the South African Students Movement; the Black People's Convention (BPC), an umbrella political body; and the Black Allied Workers' Union, whose formation was partly the result of a resolution of the SASO conference in 1972.

SASO believes:

Reflecting the terms of the founders' dissatisfaction with NUSAS and UCM, membership of SASO was restricted to blacks only – although "black", in the Black Consciousness movement, was used as a positive identification for those formerly known as "non-white", and therefore included Indians and Coloureds as well as so-called black Africans. This exclusivity was viewed as allowing blacks "to forge solidarity and unity and formulate their political beliefs and goals", and therefore was to enable both black self-reflection and black self-reliance in leading political change. A popular motto of both the organisation and the movement was coined by Pityana: "Black man you are on your own".