Sharpeville, 50 years later: a crime that still echoes
Some years ago, in the company of one of its designers, this writer had the opportunity to visit the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, just before it was opened to the public. Many of the shocking features well-known to people who have visited since were already in place, the entry card assigned by race, the video footage of the gatherings at the Voortrekker Monument, the small mountain of guns collected from the near-open warfare of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands in the 1980s, or Ernest Cole’s photographs of the appalling living conditions of mine workers.
But for this viewer, the most astonishing element of the exhibitions was something collected almost by happenstance – actual film footage of the march on the South African Parliament from Langa and Nyanga townships in 1960. This film footage was almost lost to history. A telephone lineman doing some repair work was also an amateur filmmaker who, while perched atop a telephone pole, happened to have his camera at the ready. This footage sat forgotten for decades in his storeroom and his children, years later, found it and offered it to the Apartheid Museum on the chance it might be historically interesting.
In this film, thousands of disciplined marchers on their way to Parliament on 30 March, under the leadership of Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) youth leader Philip Kgosana, are walking kilometre after kilometre from the sandy reaches of the Cape Flats towards the city centre. This march, and the demonstrations in Sharpeville, Evaton and other places on the Witwatersrand a week earlier, were part of a virtually unprecedented national anti-pass law campaign organised by the PAC, the new anti-apartheid group established by individuals who had just broken away from the ANC because they were dissatisfied with the pace and intensity of the ANC’s opposition to the government’s repressive measures. Under the charismatic Robert Sobukwe, the PAC set out to organise a national anti-pass law campaign, with marches, demonstrations and mass action to turn in the hated passbooks to the police, and thereby refuse to obey the fundamental mechanism underpinning the entire apartheid edifice.
Kgosana ultimately led 20,000 protesters to Parliament. There, police officers promised to allow him to meet with government officials to present the crowd’s grievances – only to arrest him when he returned for that meeting. It sets one wondering, what would have happened had Kgosana simply refused to meet with officials and, instead, insisted on entering Parliament with his gigantic crowd, or, what if the government had actually negotiated with him in good faith instead of arresting him?
During the protests, in some places, the police and the military managed to disperse the protesters, intimidating them with shows of force using military aircraft and armoured cars. But at Sharpeville on 21 March, a crowd the PAC and other eyewitnesses said was no more than 7,000 boisterous but relatively controlled people – but that the police later claimed to be more than 20,000 rioting, violent and mutinous people – closed in on the local police station intent on carrying out their protest and handing over their passbooks. Someone threw a few rocks and the police responded with automatic weapons fire, killing 69 unarmed people and wounding hundreds more.