Sharpeville day fifty years on will be marked by a seminar presentation by Professor Paul Maylam, Head of the History Department at Rhodes University. Prof Maylam will examine, on Tuesday 23 March, the short-term and long-term impact of that fateful day when many were massacred on 21 March 1960 in Sharpeville, in the Gauteng province.
The seminar will raise questions about whether “the massacre was a premeditated assault” by the vicious apartheid state? Or a "massacre by mistake", brought about in an atmosphere of fear and panic?
Sharpeville has been viewed as one of the key watershed events in the history of twentieth century South Africa, altering the course of the liberation struggle and creating a cyclical pattern that would continue for the next thirty years.
The assistant editor of Drum magazine Humphrey Tyler, describing the Sharpeville massacre at the time stated:
"Protestors were chanting ’Izwe Lethu’ meaning ’Our land’ or gave the thumbs up ’freedom salute’, and shouted ’Afrika’. Nobody was afraid, in actual fact they were in a cheerful mood. There were plenty of police and more ammunition than uniforms. A Pan Africanist leader approached us and said his organisation and the marches were against violence and was demonstrating peacefully.
“Suddenly I heard chilling cries of ’Izwe Lethu’ it sounded mainly like the voices of women. Hands went up in the famous black power salute. That is when the shooting started. We heard the clatter of machine guns one after the other. The protestors thought they were firing blanks or warning shots.
“One woman was hit about ten yards away from our car, as she fell to the ground her companion went back to assist, he thought she had stumbled. Then he tried to pick her up, as he turned her around he saw her chest had been blown away from the hail of bullets. He looked at the blood on his hand and screamed ’God she had been shot’. Hundreds of kids were running like wild rabbits, some of them were gunned down. Shooting only stopped when no living protestor was in sight".
Later police said they felt that they were in “extreme danger” because the crowd was throwing stones at them. They also said that the crowd was armed with weapons. Photographs taken by the press later revealed that protestors were unarmed. No one dared to testify against the apartheid police.
News of the Sharpeville "massacre" was received with horror in South Africa and the world.
The seminar takes place at 17:00 in the Humanities seminar room, Rhodes and all are welcome.