Johannesburg | Thursday
There were spontaneous outbursts of song and rapturous applause when former president Nelson Mandela arrived unexpectedly at the Sharpeville memorial precinct on Thursday.
Mandela, accompanied by Deputy President Jacob Zuma and Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa, was paying his respects to the 69 people who were killed on 21 March, 1960, when police opened fire on a crowd who had gathered to protest the pass laws imposed by the apartheid government.
Johannes Sefatsa (61) was one of a large group of people who gathered at the Sharpeville memorial near Vereeniging to commemorate the events that reverberated around the world in 1960.
”Nobody was at school that day, we all wanted to make our voices heard,” said Sello Matlhare, another Sharpeville survivor.
Sefatsa and Matlhare were schoolboys in the same class and have remained firm friends for the past 42 years.
Neither Sefatsa nor his friend thought police would open fire.
”We were so innocent,” Sefatsa said. ”We did not think they would shoot women running away with babies on their backs.”
Asked how he felt about the events that unfolded in South Africa since the shootings, Sefatsa said his hope grew stronger by the day.
”Africans are a wondrous people… we forgive,” he said.
Matlhare said when people lay dead on the ground there was an almost supernatural silence before six clouds gathered from nowhere.
”It suddenly rained and I knew God was crying,” he said.
Pan Africanist Congress leader Stanley Mogoba is expected to arrive at the memorial precinct to make a short speech and unveil a memorial plaque.
In Cape Town, the PAC will commemorate another massacre, in which 19 people were killed in 1985 in Langa on the same date as the Sharpeville massacre.
In Pretoria, Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma paid tribute to people who were hanged for fighting against apartheid.
Dlamini-Zuma, speaking to relatives of the dead at Pretoria Maximum Prison, said the victims had fought a just struggle against an unjust and vicious apartheid system.
”We who survived cannot truly know their pain, what went through their minds, their hearts, in those final hours before they took their last steps to the gallows to be murdered by the agents of the apartheid regime,” Dlamini-Zuma said.
”We only know that if they had not taken that journey towards liberation, we would not be here today and would not be free people walking tall in the world and taking huge strides into the future,” she said. – Sapa