Sharpeville massacre

Sharpeville massacre
Part of apartheid
The row of graves of the 69 people buried at Phelindaba Cemetery. The police in 1960 required that the dead (more than 69 were killed) be buried in closed and sealed coffins so that people in Sharpeville still do not know whose body exactly is in each coffin.
Location	Sharpeville, Transvaal Province, South Africa
Date	21 March 1960 (1960-03-21)
Deaths	at least 91
Injured	at least 238
Assailants	South African Police

The Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960 at the police station in the township of Sharpeville in the then Transvaal Province of the then Union of South Africa (today part of Gauteng). A crowd of approximately 4-5,000 residents of Sharpeville gathered at the newly opened (1959) police station to protest against being required to carry passes. Though an older literature claimed that there had been disagreement about the behaviour of the crowd,, a recent book has examined the several hundred testimonies provided in the days, weeks, and months by eyewitnesses to the shooting (African residents of Sharpeville as well as African policemen and municipal employees, as well as white policemen and officials), and has proven that the crowd remained peaceful throughout the day. At around 1.40pm a line of over 70 white uniformed South African Police South African Police (SAP), 13 of them armed with Sten submachine guns, fired without warning directly into the crowd from a distance of no more than 3 to 5 yards according to contemporary testimony by both black and white witnesses to the shooting. The police fired in response to an order given to them by the Officer in Charge (OIC), Colonel Gideon Daniel Pienaar (both black and white eyewitnsses testified under oath to hearing an order to fire being given by the OIC). There were well over 300 shooting victims in total, with at least 91 people killed and at least 238 injured, many of them crippled for life. Police autopsies and medical records show that over 70% of those killed and those woulded were shot in the back as they turned and ran.

The police firing at the side and back of the police station (north and northeastern sides) was captured by one photographer Ian Berry, who initially thought the police were firing blanks. Many other photographs were taken in the immediate aftermath of the shooting by Warwick Robinson, Ronnie Manyosi, Joe Nzingo Gqabi, Charles Channon, Peter Magubane, Alf Kumalo, and an ITN film crew. Many of the photographs taken by these individuals did not survive police confiscation.

Life in Sharpeville before the massacre

Sharpeville was first built in 1942 to replace Topville, a nearby township that suffered overcrowding and where illnesses like pneumonia were widespread. Due to the overcrowding and poor sanitation, "removals" of Africans from Topville began in 1942 and ended in 1959. Approximately 20,000 Africans were forcibly removed to Sharpeville. Most people who lived in Sharpeville were long-term residents of the town or of Topville, or came from BaSotho-speaking communities who had lived in the wider area since around 1400. None were migrant workers. Most people in Sharpeville had jobs. The "Manager of Non-European Affairs" for Sharpeville reported an unemployment rate of only five percent for males over 18 in the 1950s. In 1959 the Vereeniging municipality erected a new police station in Sharpeville from which the police, most of them Africans, could raid the township day and night checking for passes, deporting people who lacked residential permits, and raiding illegal Sharpeville had a high rate of unemployment as well as high crime rates. There were also youth problems because many children joined gangs and were affiliated with crimes instead of schools. Furthermore, a new police station was created, from which the police were energetic to check passes, deporting illegal residents, and raiding illegal shebeens.

Preceding events

Demonstrators discarding their passbooks to protest apartheid, 1960

South African governments since the eighteenth century had enacted measures to restrict the entry of Africans into cities, though the modern-day, i.e. segregation and apartheid era, pass laws were first instituted in Kimberley in the 1870s as an integral part of the organization of the new diamond industry and then extended to the gold mines of the Transvaal in the 1880s and after. The pass laws, intended to control and direct the movement and employment of Africans, were updated in the 1950s. Under the country's National Party government, African residents in urban districts were subject to influx control measures. Individuals over sixteen were required to carry passbooks, which contained an identity card, employment and influx authorisation from a labour bureau, name of employer and address, and details of personal history. Leading up to the Sharpeville massacre, the National Party administration under the leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd used these laws to enforce greater racial segregation and, in 1959–1960, extended them to include women. From the 1960s, the pass laws were the primary legal instrument used by the state to regulate, detain and harass Africans.

In March 1960, The Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, issued a series of pamphlets announcing an imminent challenge to the pass laws. In this series of pamphlets, Sobukwe called on all Africans to "play your role in the positive and final act against the pass laws," wrote that "Anyone who gets this circular should keep it. He will have got hold of history," and, in the fourth and final pamphlet, issued on Friday 18 March 1960, announced that the day of action would be the following Monday, 21 March 1960. The Sharpeville branch of the PAC led by Nyakane Tsolo, a young man employed by a local industrial concern, African Cables, was the primary organiser of the protest on 21 March.

Massacre

During the evening of Sunday 20 March, and the early morning hours of Monday 21 March, Tsolo and other members of the PAC walked throughout Sharpeville, slipping pamphlets under the doors of people's houses, and calling on all men to join them in refusing to carry passes and to march to the police station after the sun rose on the 21st.African police from the Sharpeville police station, and additional black and white officers from Vereeniging, arrived around midnight and violently attacked any group of Africans that they saw walking in the streets. One of the people hit by the police, John Kolane Mofokeng, a middle-aged self-employed married man with two teenage sons, died from a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage and was the first victim of police violence on 21 March 1960.

From around 6am onwards, a growing crowd of people gathered at the Sharpeville police station, some of them organised by Nyakane Tsolo and other members of the PAC, many of them, women and children as well as men, simply attracted by the commotion and coming to see what was happening. Tsolo spoke to the local sergeant in charge of the police station, an African, and told him that the PAC members wanted to be arrested for not carrying passes. The sergeant told Tsolo that he must wait for a white officer to arrive. At no time then or later in the day did any police officer tell the crowd gathered at the police station to disperse or use any tear gas to try and get them to disperse. The police at the entrance to Sharpeville on Seeiso Street, two miles distant from the police station, did use tear gas that morning, but never at teh site of the massacre. At around 10.30am a white officer arrived from Vereeniging and spoke with Tsolo. This officer told Tsolo that a senior member of the government would come and talk to the people of Sharpeville about the pass laws, and that this senior official would arrive around 2pm that day. Verwoerd's government would later claim that this story was not true, but testimony given by government officials to the later Commission of Enquiry proved that senior officials from Johannesburg and Pretoria did indeed drive to Sharpeville and were waiting in the police station when the firing began.

By mid morning, a large crowd had gathered outside the police station, perhaps 4-5,000 people at most (though the apartheid government would later claim that 20-50,000 people were gathered, an obvious exaggeration since the entire population of Sharpeville was less than 40,000). None of the members of the crowd had any weapons. While fewer than 20 police officers had been present at the police station at the beginning of the protest on Sunday night, during the morning of the 21st increasing numbers of police reinforcements were sent from Soweto and Johannesburg so that by 1pm there were over 300 policemen at the Sharpeville police station, half of them white and armed with firearms including Sten submachine guns and Lee–Enfield rifles. African police at the time were not permitted to carry guns and were only issued wooden clubs and spears. The police were also supported by five Saracen armoured personnel carriers, four of which were stationed in the police station and one was used to ferry men between the police station and the main gate of Sharpeville. There was no evidence that anyone in the crowd was armed with any sort of weapons whether guns or clubs. Around 11.15am and then again at noon, propeller-driven Harvard Trainers and F-86 Sabre jets strafed the crowd flyingas low as 30 to 60 feet abve the ground in an attempt to intimidate the crowd. Many however, children especially, were excited by seeing th Saracens and the planes and cheered their arrival thinking that perhaps they were a sign of the imminent arrival of the important official or officials.

At around 1.15pm Colonel Gideon Daniel Pienaar arrived at the police station accompanied by three truckloads of white police officers. He ordered his men, together with the white police crews from the Saracens (all of them armed with submachine guns), and other white police to line up, shoulder to shoulder along the western side of the police station from the northern end to the southern end, all of them in the line within 10-15 feet of the crowd gathered in the no-name street (it has never been given a formal name). Inside the police station were gathered the national head and the deputy head of the Police Special Branch (SB), together with the second and third in command of the uniformed national police (SAP). The second in command of the SAP, General Hendrik Jacobus du Plooy, had himself established the SB immediately after WWII to suppress the Communist Party and to prevent labour unrest, and soon after the Sharpeville massacre would himself be promoted to become National Commissioner of Police.

At around 1.35pm, Colonel Pienaar ordered the over 70 white officers standing in front of the four Saracens and within feet of the crowd, to line up and load their weapons with live ammunition. At approximately 1.40pm, the deputy head of the SB, Colonel Abraham Theodorous Spengler, seized Nyakane Tsolo and his fellow PAC member, Thomas More, and takes them inside the police station to be interrogated by other members of the SB. Spengler then tries to identify other PAC members, grabbing them and slapping them in their faces. One of these men is Peter Molefi, known by previous scholars as the anonymous "man in the red shirt," but now able to be identified by name and occupation, a young Sharpeville resident who worked as the wine steward at the most fashionable hotel in Vereeniging.

At around 1.40pm, Colonel Pienaar, who as the senior uniformed officer publicly on duty that day was the Officer in Charge (OIC), the person ultimately responsible for giving all orders, yelled out to his men to fire (Vuur!). Though his second in command that day, Lieutenant Jakobus Johannes Claassen, will later testify that he personally did not hear such an order, he will testify that the seven white officers who say they heard such an order given (even though they will never identify who gave that order) are telling the truth and that the order could only have come from the OIC. Many African eyewitnesses also testify to hearing such an order given, but none are ever allowed to identify the officer who did so by means of a line up. the initial firing consists of multiple volleys by the machine gunners who empty up to three magazines (each magazine averaging 25 bullets) and account for over half of the nearly 1,400 bullets fired in 45 seconds of shooting. They fire their machine guns at near point blank range, tearing bodies apart, and strafe the crowd backwards and forwards irrespective of whether they are firing at men, women, or children, nearly all of whom have already turned to escape and most of whom are shot in the back (many in the head). Some, like those photographed by Ian Berry, fire in the second volley, shooting their guns into the backs of people already running away.

Death and injury toll

The official figure is that 69 people were killed, including 10 children, and 180 injured, including 19 children. The police shot many in the back as they turned to flee, causing some to be paralyzed. Recent research has shown, however, that these figures were a severe undercount, indeed a conscious police lie since the higher figures have always been available in the police's own documentation. Using this documentation, which since the end of apartheid has been deposited in the South African National Archives in Pretoria, the victim count, still a work in progress and likely to rise further as more people in Sharpeville are interviewed about missing family members, has been revised to "at least" 91 killed and "at least" 238 injured. The names of all these individuals, their ages, and occupations, and addresses, are available in the archival records. All their names and ages have now been published for the first time.

69 of the victims were buried en masse in two ceremonies (on 30 March and 2 April 1960)performed by local clergy. Philip Finkie Molefe, responsible for establishing the first Assemblies of God church in the Vaal, was among the clergy that conducted the service.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 1998 that "the evidence of Commission deponents reveals a degree of deliberation in the decision to open fire at Sharpeville and indicates that the shooting was more than the result of inexperienced and frightened police officers losing their nerve."

Response

Painting depicting victims of the massacre

The uproar among South Africa's black population was immediate, and the following week saw demonstrations, protest marches, strikes, and riots around the country. On 30 March 1960, the government declared a state of emergency, detaining more than 18,000 people, including prominent anti-apartheid activists who were known as members of the Congress Alliance including Nelson Mandela and some still enmeshed in the Treason Trial.

A storm of international protest followed the Sharpeville shootings, including sympathetic demonstrations in many countries and condemnation by the United Nations led by other African nationas as well as newly independent states in Asia and South America. On 1 April 1960, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 134.

Sharpeville marked a turning point in South Africa's history; the country found itself increasingly isolated in the international community. The event also played a role in South Africa's departure from the Commonwealth of Nations in 1961.

The Sharpeville massacre contributed to the banning of the PAC and ANC as illegal organisations. The massacre was one of the catalysts for a shift from passive resistance to armed resistance by these organisations. The foundation of Poqo, the military wing of the PAC, and Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC, followed shortly afterwards.

Most importantly, the Sharpeville massacre directly influenced two major decisions by the United Nations. In 1966 the UN adopted two major resolutions with regard to South Africa and apartheid. The first, adopted on 26 October 1966, 2142 (XII), reaffirmed the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and its determination “that racial discrimination and apartheid are denials of human rights and fundamental freedoms and of justice and are offences against human dignity,” and added that “21 March [should be adopted worldwide] as [the] International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.” The second resolution, adopted 16 December 1966, 2202 (XXI), took “note with satisfaction of the report of the Seminar on Apartheid, Brasilia 23 August to 4 September 1966,” and as its first action “Condemns the policies of apartheid practiced by the Government of South Africa as a crime against humanity.”

Not all reactions were negative: embroiled in its opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, the Mississippi House of Representatives voted for a resolution supporting the South African government "for its steadfast policy of segregation and the [staunch] adherence to their traditions in the face of overwhelming external agitation."

Commemoration

Since 1994, 21 March has been commemorated as Human Rights Day in South Africa.

Sharpeville was the site selected by President Nelson Mandela for the signing into law of the Constitution of South Africa on 10 December 1996.

In 1998, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) found that the police actions constituted "gross human rights violations in that excessive force was unnecessarily used to stop a gathering of unarmed people."

On 21 March 2002, the 42nd anniversary of the massacre, a memorial was opened by former President Nelson Mandela as part of the Sharpeville Human Rights Precinct.

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

UNESCO marks 21 March as the yearly International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in memory of the massacre.

References in art and literature

The Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker mentioned the Sharpeville Massacre in her verse.

The event was an inspiration for painter Oliver Lee Jackson in his Sharpeville Series from the 1970s.

Ingrid de Kok was a child living on a mining compound near Johannesburg where her father worked at the time of the Sharpeville massacre. In her poem "Our Sharpeville" she reflects on the atrocity through the eyes of a child.

Max Roach's 1960 Album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite includes the composition "Tears for Johannesburg" in response to the massacre.

South African artist Gavin Jantjes dedicated several prints in his series A South African Colouring Book (1974-75) to the Sharpeville Massacre. Iconic reportage photographs of scattering protesters are arranged alongside stenciled and handwritten captions pulled from news reporting of the unfolding event.

See also

• List of massacres in South Africa
• 1922 Turin massacre, a similar event in Italy
• Polish 1970 protests, a similar event in Poland
• 2018–2019 Gaza border protests, a similar toll over months at the Gaza-Israeli border.
• Gwangju Uprising, a similar event in South Korea
• Thammasat University massacre, a similar event in Thailand
• February 28 incident, a similar event in Taiwan
• Wanpaoshan Incident, a similar event in Eastern Asia
• Marikana massacre – August 2012 police shooting of approximately 34 striking miners widely compared to Sharpeville
• Sharpeville Six – six people convicted from a demonstration in Sharpeville in 1984 which drew international attention
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 610
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 615
• Year of Africa
• Bulhoek massacre