March 21, 1960
| South African Police Kill
69 Black Protesters
in Sharpeville Massacre
By THE LEARNING NETWORK
Keystone / Bodies of protesters lay on the ground in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre.
On March 21, 1960, South African police officers opened fire on a crowd of black protesters who had surrounded a police station in Sharpeville, killing 69 people.
The Sharpeville protests began over South Africa’s pass laws, which required black South Africans to carry passbooks with them any time they traveled out of their designated home areas. The African National Congress, the leading antiapartheid organization of the era, planned for an antipass campaign to begin March 31, 1960. The Pan Africanist Congress, a more militant offshoot of the A.N.C., organized a campaign that would begin 10 days before the A.N.C.’s.
On March 21, Pan Africanist leaders in Sharpeville assembled a demonstration of 5,000 to 7,000 people, in part through intimidating locals to join. In the morning, they led the protest to the Sharpeville police station, where they demanded to be arrested for not carrying passes. Police reinforcements arrived during the incident. The March 22 New York Times reported: “South African Air Force planes flew over the trouble spot in a show of force. But the Africans ignored all orders to disperse.”
In the afternoon, small scuffles broke out and some demonstrators began throwing rocks at the police. As the crowd moved forward toward one scuffle, the police began firing into the crowd.
The April 3 New York Times published an account by Humphrey Tyler, an assistant editor at Drum magazine who was white, who described the demonstration as peaceful and little threat to the officers’ safety. He wrote: “We heard the chatter of a machine gun, then another, then another. Bodies were falling. Hundreds of children were running. Some of the children were shot, too. Still the shooting went on.”
The shootings sparked protests and riots among black South Africans throughout the country. On March 30, the government declared a state of emergency; it arrested thousands of blacks and outlawed the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress.
The Sharpeville massacre represents a turning point in the history of apartheid. The banning of the two protest groups forced antiapartheid leaders underground and convinced them to end their campaigns of passive, nonviolent resistance in favor of armed struggle.
The Sharpeville massacre also brought international condemnation on South Africa, including a United Nations resolution. An editorial in the
March 22 New York Times asked, “Do the South Africans really think that the rest of the world will ignore such a massacre? Perhaps it takes a horror like the slaughter at Sharpeville to bring home to the white South Africans themselves the evil that the policy of apartheid represents.”
Connect to Today
“A hellhole with a claim on history,” Bill Keller wrote in a March 1994 New York Times article describing Sharpeville, just before South Africa’s first elections with universal suffrage. In 2010, on the 50th anniversary of the massacre and 16 years after the end of apartheid, Sharpeville residents organized demonstrations to call attention to their continued economic struggles.
The Associated Press reported, “Survivors of the massacre are tired of telling their stories: They are wondering when the change they thought they were fighting for 50 years ago will come to Sharpeville.” Today, though South Africa recognizes March 21 as Human Rights Day and apartheid ended nearly two decades ago, many Sharpeville residents feel neglected by the government they helped vote into power. Why do you think political freedom hasn’t delivered economic freedom for many black South Africans? What do you think it will take for Sharpeville, a symbol of South African struggle, and other poor cities to break out of poverty and despair?