Showing posts with label # Remembering Sharpeville Massacre # South Africa# Apartheid # Nelson Mandela # International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination #Palestine # Dennis Brutas '# History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label # Remembering Sharpeville Massacre # South Africa# Apartheid # Nelson Mandela # International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination #Palestine # Dennis Brutas '# History. Show all posts

Sunday 21 March 2021

Remembering Sharpeville Massacre

 

On March 21, 1960. at a police station  in the  small Black South African  township of Sharpeville near  Johannesburg , following a day of demonstrations, police opened fire on a crowd of around 5,000 to 7,000 protestors. The crowds had gathered  to protest the establishment of apartheid pass laws which restricted movement of non-whites. designed to segregate the population.
 The Sharpeville Massacre took place in a South Africa that denied even basic democratic rights and freedoms to those considered as "non-white" under an apartheid (racial segregation and discrimination) system.
 Apartheid means “apartness” in the Afrikaans language. The concept was endorsed, legalized and promoted by the National Party, which was elected in South Africa in 1948 by a minority, 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.” White people – 15 percent of the South African population – stood at the top, wielding power and wealth. Black South Africans – 80 percent of the population – were relegated to the very bottom. Apartheid laws restricted almost every aspect of black South Africans’ lives.
The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) planned a series of national protests against the pass laws in 1960. Black South Africans were asked to gather outside police stations around the country on March 21 and offer themselves up for arrest, for not carrying their pass books. 
 At Langa Township in Cape Town, two people were killed and 49 injured when police opened fire. Sharpeville, was through the 1950s a community untouched by anti-apartheid demonstrations that occurred in surrounding towns.  By 1960, however, anti-apartheid activism reached the town.  In March 1960, Robert Sobukwe, a leader in the anti-apartheid Pab=Adricn Congress (PAC)  organized the town’s first anti-apartheid protest.  In order to reduce the possibility of violence he wrote a letter to the Sharpeville police commissioner announcing the upcoming protest and emphasizing that its participants would be non-violent.
Nearly 300 police officers arrived to put an end to the peaceful protest.  As they attempted to disperse the crowd, a police officer was knocked down and many in the crowd began to move forward to see what had happened.  Police witnesses claimed that stones were thrown, and in a panicked and rash reaction, the officers opened fire into the crowd.  Other witnesses claimed there was no order to open fire, and the police did not fire a warning shot above the crowd.  As the thousands of Africans tried to flee the violent scene, police continued to shoot into the crowd.  Sixty-nine unarmed Africans were killed and 186 were wounded with most shot in the back.
 Sharepville became a symbol of the violence and racist cruelty of the apartheid regime that divided black and white and reduced Africans to third class citizens in the land of their birth.
 But there was also resistance. As the bodies were being carted away so news of the massacre raced around the countries’ poverty stricken townships. In Cape Town thousands of African workers stopped work and stevedores walked off the ships.
Aday of mourning” a week later resulted in riots and shooting around Johannesburg, and police baton charges at the crowds in Cape Town.
Nelson Mandela and his 29 co-accused in the infamous Treason Trial were still on trial when the massacre happened. In his autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recalled: “The massacre at Sharpeville created a new situation in the country ... A small group of us – Walter [Sisulu], Duma Nokwe, Joe Slovo and I – held an all-night meeting in Johannesburg to plan a response. We knew we had to acknowledge the events in some way and give the people an outlet for their anger and grief. We conveyed our plans to Chief Luthuli, and he readily accepted them. On March 26, in Pretoria, the chief publicly burned his pass, calling on others to do the same. He announced a nationwide stay-at-home for March 28, a national Day of Mourning and protest for the atrocities at Sharpeville. In Orlando, Duma Nokwe and I then burned our passes before hundreds of people and dozens of press photographers.


                                                        Nelson Mandela burning his pass

The world was shocked too and condemnation was universal. International solidarity and the isolation of apartheid South Africa became one of the key elements contributing to its demise. People abroad, by linking hands with South Africa’s oppressed, provided inspiration and decisive support. 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. Since then, apartheid and many of its elements have been codified as crimes against humanity.
The massacre also sparked hundreds of mass protests by black South Africans, many of which were ruthlessly and violently crushed by the South African police and military.  On March 30, the South African government under Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd declared a state of emergency which made any protest illegal.  The ban remained in effect until August 31, 1960.  During those five months roughly 25,000 people were arrested throughout the nation.  The South African government then created the Unlawful Organizations Act of 1960 which banned anti-apartheid groups such as the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress. 
The South African’s government’s repressive measures in response to the Sharpeville Massacre, however, intensified and expended the opposition to apartheid, many  members of both organizations mentioned 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.'
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.Nelson Mandela became commander-in-chief of the ANC’s armed wing, “Umkhonto we Sizwe” or “Spear of the Nation”They took to acts of sabotage against government targets, which sometimes killed civilians. These were denounced by South Africa’s main backers, Britain and the United States and the ANC was labelled as a “terrorist organisation”.Following his arrest, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment on four counts of sabotage.
However, many foreign investors pulled out of the country and a number of sporting boycotts followed. Many long years of struggle and suffering lay ahead. but the  Sharpeville massacre was a turning point South African history and led to a chain of events that shaped the direction of resistance to apartheid both in South African and internationally and heped  create a receptive political setting for the British Boycott Movement’  Sharpeville certainly played a decisive role in the Boycott Movement's transformation into the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM).
The incident and its repercussions alsp led to the growing politicisation of the South African working class and created a more militant younger generation in the townships. The struggle in the townships grew steadily, with a major uprising in Soweto, Johannesburg in1976. By 1985, the regime had lost control of these working class districts and declared a state of emergency. The country was on the brink of civil war. Elements in the regime and leading businessmen opened talks with the ANC, recognising that it was the only organisation that could quell a revolutionary upsurge.
President F. W. de Klerk released the ANC’s Nelson Mandela from prison on February 2, 1990, heralding the end of the Apartheid system. White minority rule finally collapsed in 1994 in elections that brought the ANC and Mandela to power. Had he not released Mandela when he did, de Klerk said, “The prospects for a satisfactory negotiated settlement would have diminished with each successive cycle of revolution and repression”.
 Symbolically in 1994, Mandela signed the nation’s first post-apartheid constitution near the site of the 1960 massacre. The anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre is remembered the world over every March 21as International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Proclaiming the day in 1966, the United Nations General Assembly called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.
In South Africa, Human Rights Day is a public holiday wbich is celebrated on 21 March each year. The day commemorates the lives of those who died to fight for democracy and equal human rights for all in South Africa during apartheid an institutionally racist system built upon racial discrimination. 
 While the Sharpeville Massacre and its annual commemoration serve as a stark reminder of the violent consequences of the apartheid regime in South Africa and its threat to fundamental rights, freedoms, and human dignity, it is also a time to commemorate the ultimate defeat of this institutionalised system of oppression, and encourages us to continue to work to bring an end to all forms of racial discrimination, racial segregation, and apartheid around the world. But this work is not done, particularly as apartheid endures in Palestine.
 For decades, Israel has established and maintained an apartheid regime over the Palestinian people, through a plethora of laws, policies, and practices designed to ruthlessly segregate, fragment, and isolate Palestinians. The Palestinian people have been deliberately divided into four separate legal, political, and geographic domains, including Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza subject to Israeli military law, and as a result, Israel ensures that the Palestinian people are unable to meet, group, or live together, nor exercise any collective rights.
As I mark the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, more efforts must be taken to ensure the legacy of apartheid, and all other forms of racial discrimination and oppression, are finally brought to an end. In the same way that apartheid fell in South Africa, supporters of human rights, international law, social justice, and equality must exert pressure today to uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
"Remember Sharpeville" was the late South African activist, educator, journalist, former inmate with Nelson Mandela at Robben Island in the mid -1960s, and poet  Dennis Brutus memorial to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960,
 
 Remember Sharpeville - Dennis Brutus
 
 What is important

about Sharpeville

is not that seventy died:

nor even that they were shot in the back

retreating, unarmed, defenseless

and certainly not

the heavy caliber slug

that tore through a mother’s back

and ripped through the child in her arms

killing it

Remember Sharpeville

bullet-in-the-back day

Because it epitomized oppression

and the nature of society

more clearly than anything else;

it was the classic event

Nowhere is racial dominance

more clearly defined

nowhere the will to oppress

more clearly demonstrated

what the world whispers

apartheid with snarling guns

the blood lust after

South Africa spills in the dust

Remember Sharpeville

Remember bullet-in-the-back day

And remember the unquenchable will for freedom

Remember the dead

and be glad.