Front page of the Contact (The Friday Times)
It’s ironic that the front page of the only publication to carry a full eye-witness report of the Sharpeville killings at the time, 30 years ago this week, had a banner headline saying: Apartheid-the end approaches. The paper was Contact, whose editor, Patrick Duncan, was later jailed. Even more astonishing at the time was that, right until a few hours before the shooting at Sharpeville, and demonstrations elsewhere, the police and the government almost entirely dismissed the importance of the Pan Africanist Congress and boasted confidently that ”nothing will happen”, ‘ that ”everything is under control”.
A rather drunken senior reporter who had been touring the Johannesburg townships with the police early on Sharpeville Monday told me: ”You can forget it.” The PAC was out of touch with reality also, but maybe not quite so ‘ much. They were right about the widespread, overwhelming hatred for the pass laws. But they underestimated the power of the government. Some of them thought the ”revolution” would be over in a few days. They were driving around the townships waving their pipes out of the windows or pointing fingers and telling anybody with them that ”we’ll be living in Lower Houghton soon, man, and the whites can move to Orlando”. Predictions like this were greeted with gales of laughter. The role of the establishment newspapers was generally very dubious. No reporter who made any proper inquiries could fail to realise that Mangaliso Sobukwe and his chief lieutenant Potlako Leballo were stirring a hot, responsive pot in the townships. But the big commercial papers printed little or nothing about this, more or less deliberately keeping their readers uninformed.
When I asked a senior executive on the Rand Daily Mail why there was virtually no news about the PAC in the paper he said: ”We don’t want to give them propaganda or publicity; that would only cause trouble.” Its readers must have been mighty surprised when, within days, there was a State of Emergency, thousands were arrested, the pass laws were suspended and a madman shot Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd twice in the face in front of thousands of people at the Rand Show. An Anglican bishop fled to Swaziland. It was a ”black” publication – Drum (quite a different thing in those days to the generally insignificant affair that carries the same name today) – that got it right.
Benson Dyantji was the reporter who was on to the story and he took me Sunday after Sunday to township meetings in the veld where hundreds, sometimes a few thousand, would gather under the PAC flag to hear about the plan for a campaign against the pass laws. Sometimes a police car would stop for a few minutes, then drive away. But it was obvious something big was brewing. Drum advanced its publication day to coincide with March 21 and increased its print order by several thousand. On the cover, printed days before publication because of peculiar press problems, was a full colour photograph of Sobukwe marching with supporters in the shadow of a huge PAC flag. A yellow banner headline asked: Who are the Africanists?
By nightfall on March 21, that was the question everyone in South Africa was asking and by the time the special branch police decided to raid Drum offices round the country, there were hardly any copies left for them to take away. It’s curious how people plot revolutions. A few nights before Sharpeville I went to Leballo’s remote Soweto home. We drove over a typically rutted township track in one of Drum‘s decrepit cars. When we stopped and the driver pulled on the handbrake, the lever came off in his hand. Leballo came to the fence to greet us. He was smoking a pipe. He was always smoking a pipe. He puffed full blast like a steam locomotive. He apologised for his overgrown garden, waved at the weeds, said: ”I’m too busy with politics.”
Sobukwe was inside, a very tall and momentous figure. People kept coming and going after getting last-minute – instructions. The ”shadow minister of labour” wore thick rubber-soled shoes and heavy glasses. Sobukwe’s plan was devastatingly simple. All black men would march peacefully to their nearest police station and hand in their passes, and never carry them again. The police would then (under existing legislation) arrest the men. Very soon, the jails would be full and the remaining blacks would bum their passes and ”refrain from working”. There would be a collapse of the economy.
If the government held out, the strikers would start getting hungry and although the protest was planned to be at least initially peaceful ”violence would then tend to be inevitable”. The pressure on the government would be intense and Sobukwe believed it would be a matter only of a few weeks before negotiations would begin. Some of his supporters translated this to mean sitting in Pretoria behind fat desks in a few days. They were wrong, of course, but South Africa came perilously close to a full-scale revolution, nonetheless. In the middle of the talk of revolution there was an incongruous interruption.
Mrs Leballo came in from the kitchen, hushing people up. She brought in tea on a tray, with doilies under the cups, and offered everybody biscuits. We said thank you and sipped our drinks. Our driver battled to tum the car round in the narrow track and we headed back to town. Three days later the shots were fired that gave momentum to a political process that continues to this day.
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail.
