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The Sharpeville Massacre Violence and the Struggles of the African National Congress

2023, Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

During the long process of decolonization in South Africa, the Sharpeville Massacre was a turning point for the African National Congress' decision to begin using violence for the internal resistance to apartheid. Nelson Mandela and the ANC reacted to the Sharpeville Massacre by shifting their methods to incorporate the practicality of anti-colonial violence. In his 1964 "I Am Prepared to Die" speech, Mandela acknowledged that peaceful resistance was met with brutal force, and this could not go on. The ANC continued its strong non-violent resistance while also developing a military wing and conducting sabotage. This essay brings into question the realities of non-violence in the face of violent oppression.

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Frank Meintjies

Nelson Mandela was both a man of peace and a leader that deployed violence during South Africa's national liberation struggle. This ambiguous legacy, and particuularly the part which involved the resort to armed struggle, creates a context for the use of violence in the post-apartheid era by certain formations. It is argued that such violence, however, to the extent that such formations eschew other channels of democratic expression, closes downs democratic space and detracts from processes of strengthening democracy. This situation, this article suggests, calls on proponents of non-violence to more assertively and skillfully challenge those who espouse violence, even if it means revisiting and reframing the strategies used by Nelson Mandela.

Journal of Southern African Studies

Simon Stevens

The Congress movement in South Africa was transformed in the early 1960s from a movement committed to the exclusive use of non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid to one focused on rural guerrilla warfare as a free-standing and sufficient first step towards ‘all-out war’ and the armed seizure of power. But few, if any, of the participants in the Congress movement’s deliberations in 1960–61 on whether to ‘turn to violence’ had believed that this was the strategy that they were endorsing when they authorised the abandonment of exclusive reliance on non-violence. The choice facing the Congress movement after 1960 was not between mutually exclusive alternatives of ‘non-violence’ on the one hand and ‘violence’ or ‘armed struggle’ on the other. Rather, Congress leaders contemplated a range of different forms of violent action and considered their relationship to various forms of non-violent activity and to the kind of transition from apartheid that these actions could and should be intended to produce. This article analyses the range of strategic options that were canvassed within the Congress leadership in the early 1960s and the decision-making process by which those options were gradually narrowed. That process was shaped by ambiguity, unilateral action, unintended consequences and state repression, with the result that the Congress movement’s ‘turn to violence’ ultimately took a form that few Congress leaders had initially desired or anticipated.

Jessica Forsee

Apartheid South Africa represented a paradox as a US ally and human rights pariah. “Genocide Masquerading” uncovers the implications of US foreign policy on the rise and decline of apartheid, looking specifically at the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre and the 1976 Soweto Uprising. By comparing Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, and Carter foreign policy responses, this thesis creates a comparative analysis of how effective, or ineffective, the United States was during pivotal moments in apartheid history. This thesis will not only expand on the developing South African literature but add to the conversation of international aid, diplomacy practices, and North-South relationships. Thesis Mentor:________________________ Dr. Cathy Skidmore-Hess Honors Director:_______________________ Dr. Steven Engel April 2019 History Department University Honors Program Georgia Southern University

Southern African Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health

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John E Higginson

This book examines the dark odyssey of official and private collective violence against the rural African population and Africans in general during the two generations before apartheid became the primary justification for the existence of the South African state. John Higginson discusses how Africans fought back against the entire spectrum of violence ranged against them, demonstrating just how contingent apartheid was on the struggle to hijack the future of the country's African majority.

Social Dynamics-a Journal of The Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town

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African Affairs

Nicholas Rush Smith

Academic and policy interest in the emergence, development, and efficacy of rights has increased substantially over the last twenty years. One particular effect that scholars have recently identified is the connection between the spread of rights across the globe and large-scale reductions in violence. While the expansion of rights may enable reductions in violence, the evidence in this article suggests the opposite may also be true. Drawing on ethnographic research on vigilantism in South Africa, a country deeply invested in the twentieth century rights revolution, the article shows how vigilantes have used the state's expanding rights regime to justify violence. Specifically, it examines the growth and spread of what was at one time South Africa's largest vigilante group, Mapogo a Mathamaga. Mapogo first emerged shortly after the country's transition to democracy and rapidly grew as its leadership preached a gospel that rejected rights, claiming that rights enabled crime and allowed immorality to proliferate. By assaulting suspected criminals, Mapogo's members claim that they are correcting the criminal, the post-apartheid state, and the flawed rights regime on which it is based, an outcome which the existing literature on rights and violence has difficulty explaining.

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Sharpeville: An apartheid massacre and its consequences

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Arianna Lissoni, Sharpeville: An apartheid massacre and its consequences, African Affairs , Volume 111, Issue 445, October 2012, Pages 686–687, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/ads045

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The year 2010 marked the fiftieth anniversary of one of apartheid South Africa's most infamous atrocities: the Sharpeville massacre. On 21 March 1960, the police opened fire on a group of demonstrators who had gathered peacefully outside Sharpeville police station in response to a nationwide call by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) to protest against the hated pass system; 67 people died and hundreds more were wounded. Two PAC supporters were also killed by police fire in the African township of Langa, outside Cape Town. The event has since become inscribed in both the country's collective memory and its historiography as a watershed, a turning point which fundamentally altered the course of South Africa's history. Tom Lodge's new book, published fifty-one years after the massacre, revisits this dramatic historical moment. Using oral testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), interviews with local participants and key PAC leaders (including notes on Sobukwe and other Africanists by Benjamin Pogrund, and transcripts of interviews by Gail Gerhart), government-sponsored commissions of inquiry, trial records, and newspaper reports as well as a wide range of secondary sources, the book seeks to explain why the massacre happened when it did and where it did, and what changed afterwards (p. 27). It is thoroughly compiled, and provides a good overview of organized black politics over the past 50 years. However, it is a shame that in Chapters 1 and 5 the flow of writing is repeatedly interrupted by what appears to be a typesetting problem, with many words joined together rather than separated by a space.

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The Sharpeville Massacre The Sharpeville Massacre

A violent turning point in the history of South African apartheid

By Matthew McRae Published: March 19, 2019 Updated: August 8, 2023

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Photo: Peter Magubane

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On March 21, 1960, police officers in a Black township in South Africa opened fire on a group of people peacefully protesting oppressive laws. Sixty‐nine protestors were killed. The anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre is remembered around the world on March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Apartheid and the pass system

The Sharpeville Massacre occurred in South Africa during the era of “apartheid,” a racist legal system that denied rights and freedoms to anyone who was not considered white.

White people were a minority in South Africa, making up only 15 percent of the population. But they stood at the top of politics and society, wielding power and wealth. Black South Africans made up 80 percent of the population but were marginalized, repressed and relegated to the very bottom. White colonial authorities had used racist laws and violence to repress the Black population long before the formal creation of apartheid. But the imposition of apartheid formalized and intensified white supremacist discrimination and inequality.

Apartheid means "apartness" in the Afrikaans language. It was formally endorsed, legalized and promoted by the National Party (NP). The NP was narrowly elected in South Africa in 1948 by an almost exclusively white electorate.

Apartheid laws placed all South Africans into one of four racial categories: "white/European," "native/black," "coloured" (people of "mixed race"), or "Indian/Asian." These laws restricted almost every aspect of Black South Africans’ lives.

A man showing his pass in 1985. Passes restricted where Black South Africans could live, work and travel.

Some of the most restrictive laws were "pass laws." These laws forced Black South Africans to carry special identification that police and other authorities could check at any time. The government used passes to restrict where Black South Africans could work, live and travel.

Similar laws had existed before apartheid, but under apartheid, they became much worse. Pass laws were used to confine the Black population to specific Black‐only settlement areas. They were also used to control and exploit Black workers, who could be forced to live far away from their homes and families. Millions of Black South Africans were arrested, jailed, and brutalized under the authority of these repressive laws.

The origins of apartheid

Apartheid was firmly rooted in South Africa’s colonial history. As in Canada and other colonized regions, European powers violently displaced Indigenous communities and took control of their lands. By the time the NP formally imposed apartheid, the white minority controlled almost all – 92 percent – of the land.

The NP emerged from centuries of conflict among Dutch and British colonizers and Indigenous communities. The Party was formed mainly of Afrikaners – descendants of Dutch colonizers – who believed they had a God‐given mission to establish white rule in Africa. After the NP was elected in 1948, it quickly passed laws to further entrench longstanding practices of segregation, racial oppression and white supremacy.

Resistance and Sharpeville

For years, many South Africans peacefully protested against apartheid laws, including the pass system. In March 1960, a group called the Pan African Congress (PAC) decided to organize a protest in the Black township of Sharpeville. The plan was for protestors to march to the local police station without their passes and ask to be arrested, in an act of civil disobedience.

Just before the massacre begins, an armoured vehicle drives through a crowd of people chanting.

On March 21, thousands of South Africans marched to the Sharpeville police station. They gathered in peaceful defiance, refusing to carry their pass books. They chanted freedom songs and shouted, "Down with passes!" Simon Mkutau, who participated in the protest, would later recall: "The atmosphere was cheerful; people were happy, singing and dancing." 1 However, as time went by, more and more police began to appear, along with increasing numbers of armoured vehicles. Military jets began to fly overhead.

Then, without warning, the police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. Lydia Mahabuke was there when it happened. Mahabuke tried to run but felt something hit her in the back. "After having felt this, I tried to look back. People were falling, scattered. There was blood streaming down my leg. I tried to hobble. I struggled to get home." 2

People flee the shooting at the police station. Nearly all the dead and injured had been shot in the back.

In total, 69 people were killed and more than 180 people were injured, mostly shot in the back as they fled the violence. A later report would state over 700 bullets had been fired, all by police. 3

Afterwards, some witnesses claimed they saw police putting guns and knives in the hands of dead victims, to make it look like the protestors were armed and violent. Others said they saw police mocking people who they found alive. Some even claimed that the police killed injured people as they lay on the ground. In some cases, police followed the wounded to the hospital, arrested them and took them to prison. In other cases, the police waited until victims had healed somewhat, then arrested them. 4

While we were standing there and singing we suddenly saw the police in a row pointing their guns at us. Whilst we were still singing, without any word, without any argument, we just heard the guns being fired.

Lydia Mahabuke

The aftermath of the massacre

After the arrests, people in Sharpeville were afraid to talk about the tragedy. "In the days after the shootings, nothing happened," said Albert Mbongo, who participated in the protest and managed to escape without injury. 5 "Nobody dared say anything," said Mbongo, "because if you did you were arrested. I couldn’t even attend the burial, because only women and children were allowed there."

Away from Sharpeville, however, many people did express their outrage both inside and outside South Africa. To protest the massacre, Chief Albert Luthuli, the President‐General of the African National Congress (ANC) burned his own pass. Nelson Mandela and other ANC members also burned their passes in solidarity. Shortly afterwards, on March 30, approximately 30,000 protesters marched to Cape Town to protest the shootings. 6

The international response to the massacre was swift and unanimous. Many countries around the world condemned the atrocity. On April 1, the United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a resolution condemning the killings and calling for the South African government to abandon its policy of apartheid. A month later, the UN General Assembly declared that apartheid was a violation of the UN Charter. This was the first time the UN had discussed apartheid.[7] Six years later, as a direct result of the Sharpeville Massacre, the UN declared March 21 to be the  International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination .

March 21 is the day on which we remember and sing praises to those who perished in the name of democracy and human dignity.

Nelson Mandela

Sharpeville and the fight against apartheid

After Sharpeville, South Africa’s government had become increasingly isolated, but the government refused to abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination. First, the government declared a state of emergency and detained around 2,000 people. Then, on April 8, 1960, both the ANC and PAC were banned – it became illegal to be a member of these organizations.

Many members of both organizations decided to go underground. Nelson Mandela was among those who chose to become outlaws. He would later say, "We believe in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that ‘the will of the people shall be the basis of authority of the government,’ and for us to accept the banning was the equivalent of accepting the silencing of Africans for all time." 8

Mandela and others no longer felt they could defeat apartheid peacefully. Both the PAC and the ANC formed armed wings and began a military struggle against the government. Many long years of struggle and suffering lay ahead – but Sharpeville was the beginning of the end for apartheid. Prakash Diar, a South African human rights lawyer, explains: "The whole world was outraged at what the police had done. On March 21, 1960, the isolation of South Africa started."

The eyes of the world would turn to Sharpeville again years later. During the 1980s, Diar would defend six people unjustly charged with murder by the apartheid government. The five men and one woman would become known as the Sharpeville Six – their case would attract international attention, once again putting Sharpeville on the world stage and exposing the inhumanity of the apartheid government. 9

In December 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, South Africa enacted a new constitution whose Bill of Rights affirmed the values of dignity, equality and freedom for all South Africans. It was signed by President Nelson Mandela in the town of Sharpeville, very close to where the massacre had happened. In South Africa, March 21 is now known as Human Rights Day.

It took a long time, but the isolation and boycott of South Africa slowly started, because what they were practicing was inhumane and unjust.

Prakash Diar

Ask yourself

How are people resisting injustice in your community?

What kinds of human rights activism make a difference?

How can we ensure our governments respect human rights?

Matthew McRae worked at the Museum as Researcher and as Digital Content Specialist.

Dive deeper

The story of nelson mandela .

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for opposing South Africa’s apartheid system. He faced harsh conditions meant to break his resolve, but Mandela refused to give up his efforts to achieve equality for all people.

• 1  Lodge, Tom,  Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
• 2  Ibid, 10.
• 3  Venter, Sahm,  Exploring Our National Days: Human Rights Day 21 March (Auckland Park: Jacanda Media, 2007), 22.
• 4  Lodge, Tom,  Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences , 13–14.
• 5  Ibid, 17.
• 6   The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 [1960–1970]  (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010), 239.
• 7  Dubow, Sam,  Apartheid 1948–1994 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 83.
• 8  Asmal, Kader, David Chidester and Wilmot James, éd.,  Nelson Mandela in his Own Words: From Freedom to the Future , London, Abacus, 2013, p. 30.
• 9  You can read the story of the Sharpeville Six in Prakash Diar’s book,  The Sharpeville Six  (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1990).

Suggested citation

Suggested citation : Matthew McRae. “The Sharpeville Massacre.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Published March 19, 2019. Updated: August 8, 2023. https://humanrights.ca/story/sharpeville-massacre

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This Day In History : March 21

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Massacre in Sharpeville

In the Black township of Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, South Africa, Afrikaner police open fire on a group of unarmed Black South African demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding 180 in a hail of submachine-gun fire. The demonstrators were protesting against the South African government’s restriction of nonwhite travel. In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, protests broke out in Cape Town, and more than 10,000 people were arrested before government troops restored order.

The incident convinced anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to abandon his nonviolent stance and organize paramilitary groups to fight South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial discrimination. In 1964, after some minor military action, Mandela was convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life in prison. He was released after 27 years and in 1994 was elected the first Black president of South Africa.

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