Nobody could have anticipated Sharpeville
a second look
Humphrey Tyler
So the Sharpeville massacre need not have happened. According to the Mail & Guardian (August 3) Philip Frankel, a Wits University academic, claims in his book, An Ordinary Atrocity, that it could have been avoided if, for example, there had been “proper crowd control” and less “quixotic” leadership of the demonstrators.
He is confusing an incipient revolution with an ordinary demonstration. It wouldn’t have stopped the French Revolution if the gendarmes (or whatever) at the Bastille had been equipped with riot shields and rubber bullets and been better trained, or if less “quixotic” leaders had been working the guillotines.
Similarly, if Sharpeville had not happened the day it did at Sharpeville township outside Vereeniging, something very similar would most likely have happened, sooner or later, somewhere else. The country was like Mount Etna. In or around March 1960, it was going to erupt. Not God, not prescient civil engineers, not an autocratic government had provided adequate release valves for the accumulated pressure that was building up over the pass laws. There was inchoate anger. And the government had no answer except repression, and violence.
On the day itself, at Sharpeville, many police were terrified. The cops who accosted me outside the police station were red in the face. Some told an inquiry later that they had in mind a recent murder in Cato Manor when policemen raiding shebeens in the Durban slum were cornered in a shed and burnt to death.
To many policemen, the demonstrators at Sharpeville were not “a crowd to be controlled”; they were the dreaded, savage swart gevaar.
But the people at Sharpeville were not unruly. I saw no “criminal elements”. Men do not go on a killing spree pushing their bicycles, with young children and women, and without weapons. Nobody attacked me.
The police hunkered down behind their fence and their frightened officers radioed urgently for Saracens. These arrived, led by an arrogant Special Branch officer who had definite ideas about exactly how to “control” blacks and “keep order”.
When this man reportedly lunged into the crowd and tried to arrest somebody there was a shrill cry, the crowd surged forward protectively and the tense police started shooting.
Frankel noted that some of the police did not fire their weapons and concluded also that “few were shooting with relish”. How considerate. But just what is his case? Thirty of the people who were killed or wounded at Sharpeville were shot in the front; 155 were shot in the back.
And did Frankel hear about the police officer who ran about shouting “Stop!” and banging with his baton on the barrels of the guns of men who continued to shoot after the crowd started running?
In 1960 concepts like “proper crowd control” would hardly have crossed a white South African policeman’s mind. They were trained to “keep order” and not to stand any “nonsense”. To suggest there should have been “crowd control” in any modern sense would be to have Ophelia send Hamlet an e-mail.
Okay, Frankel implies, things would have been better if the African National Congress had been in charge, or if there had been a “contingency plan” to deal with panic after the police started shooting. This boggles the mind. Nobody could have anticipated the massacre. People in Sharpeville waved at the Saracens when they drove into the township. It had been emphasised that this was to be a non-violent demonstration.
And why was this a Pan Africanist demonstration and not organised by the ANC in the “planned and carefully orchestrated manner” it seems Frankel would expect? Simple. Angry people at the time widely considered the ANC docile and hardly capable of arranging a piss-up in a brewery. Several of its leaders were drunks. People were desperate about the dompas. The PAC (a different organisation then from the current outfit) provided a focus for opposition. It rode a wave.
After Sharpeville, the ANC realised it had to be more militant or lose all credibility. Ask Nelson Mandela.
So Sharpeville was a “mistake, an aberration”, a “tragic example of what can happen when neither protesters nor police have in place the means with which to deal with crowd control”, Frankel concludes.
Does anybody except Frankel believe history happens so neatly?
Sharpeville was one of three connected momentous events in South Africa’s fairly recent past. The first was the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955, when black South Africans for the first time collectively stopped asking for “favours” and demanded their “rights”. It was a sea change. Then came Sharpeville, an expression of huge discontent against gross oppression just look at the countrywide explosions that followed. Then there was June 16 1976, when the children of Soweto, impatient with their parents’ acquiescence to subjection, revolted. That was the beginning of the end for white domination.
There was bloodshed, terrible cruelty. But revolutions often do happen without crowd control.
Frankel, reportedly an internationally acclaimed expert on “civil-military” matters, appears to have overlooked this in his unconvincing deductions about the Sharpeville massacre. He didn’t twig he was dealing with the manifestation
of revolution, not just an ordinary disturbance.
But it was in the air. The government knew it and many of the policemen at Sharpeville must have sensed it, too.
Humphrey Tyler, author of Life in the Time of Sharpeville, was assistant editor of Drum and, with photographer Ian Berry, was the only journalist in the crowd when police opened fire at Sharpeville