The Sharpeville Massacre

For a century and a half, blacks in the Union of South Africa have had to carry passbooks. But it is only in recent years, under the Boer regime of stubborn, stiff-necked Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, that the passbook has become almost a physical shackle.

The pass lists the African's name, birthplace, and tribal affiliation, contains his picture and serial number, has space for a receipt to prove that he has paid his taxes and to list his arrests, and unless it is signed each month by his employer, the African can be herded with the other unemployed into a native reservation.

If an African travels from the countryside to the city, or just across the street for cigarettes, South Africa's ubiquitous, hard-fisted police check his pass. If he stands outside his front door without his pass, the police will not let him walk five feet to get it. He is hauled off to jail, without notice to his employer or family, and fined or imprisoned. Murders go unsolved while the courts are jammed with pass offenders.

For years the Africans hated and endured the system. Then a new and more militant organization called the Pan-African Congress decided to exploit the passbook grievance. It urged Africans all over the Union to descend last week upon local police stations--without their passbooks, without arms, without violence--and demand to be arrested. In a few spots, the turnout was impressive. At Orlando township in the outskirts of Johannesburg, 20,000 Africans milled around the police station, led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, 36, a Methodist-reared university instructor, who heads the Pan-African Congress. Fifteen miles to the south, in Evaton, 70,000 Africans turned out. The nervous police made few arrests of the demonstrators; at Langa, near Cape Town, they opened fire to disperse the Africans, killing three and wounding 25.

At first, everything was relatively quiet, too, at the Sharpeville police station, 28 miles southwest of Johannesburg--but Sharpeville was soon to become a headline name the world over. Twenty police, nervously eying a growing mob of 20,000 Africans demanding to be arrested, barricaded themselves behind a 4-ft. wire-mesh fence surrounding the police station. The crowd's mood was ugly, and 130 police reinforcements, supported by four Saracen armored cars, were rushed in. Sabre jets and Harvard Trainers zoomed within a hundred feet of the ground, buzzing the crowd in an attempt to scatter it. The Africans responded by hurling stones, which rattled harmlessly off the armored cars and into the police compound, stnk-ing three policemen.

Chain Reaction. At i: 20 p.m. the blowup came. When police tried to seize an African at the gate to the compound, there was a scuffle and the crowd advanced toward the fence. Police Commander G. D. Pienaar rapped out an order to his men to load. Within minutes, almost in a chain reaction, the police began firing with revolvers, rifles, Sten guns. A woman shopper patronizing a fruit stand at the edge of the crowd was shot dead. A ten-year-old boy toppled. Crazily, the unarmed crowd stampeded to safety as more shots rang out, leaving behind hundreds lying dead or wounded--many of them shot in the back. It was all over in two awful minutes.

As the police emerged to clean up the carnage, one officer grew sick at the sight and vomited. But the police commander said coolly: "My car was struck by a stone. If they do these things, they must learn their lesson the hard way." The dead --estimates range from 72 to 90--were carted off to makeshift morgues; more than 200 wounded overflowed the native hospital. And so much plasma was needed that African blood gave out, and the wounded got transfusions from reserve white stocks.

All South Africa was stunned by the sudden bloodshed that had always been implicit in Verwoerd's unrelenting policies. The English-language Johannesburg Star assailed the government's "pathetic faith in the power of machine guns to settle basic human problems," and the Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg appealed "to all those in South Africa who have any human feelings" to stop the police tactics. More than 500 white students at the University of Natal, carrying banners reading HITLER 1939, VERWOERD 1960, assembled on campus to lower the British and South African flags to half-mast.

But in the rest of Africa and throughout the world, the reaction was even angrier. Liberia's President William Tubman called the Sharpeville massacre "the vilest, most reckless and unconscionable action in history." In London, a crowd shouting "Murder!" had to be dispersed from South Africa House under an ordinance that prohibits any public gathering within a mile of Parliament when the House of Commons is in session. In Vatican City, L'Osservatore Romano demanded to know why South Africa's police "did not employ such modern means as water hoses and tear gas, which are in use in all civilized countries,"-instead of mowing down men, women and children indiscriminately. Nowhere in the world did a single government side with South Africa.

Everywhere Deplored. The U.S. State Department, freely intruding in another nation's internal affairs contrary to usual practice, "deplored" the violence and "regretted" the tragic loss of life. U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold said that the U.N. was entitled to discuss the race riots, even if it could not intervene over them, and added: "In humanitarian terms, you need not have any doubt about my feelings." On petition of 29 Afro-Asian U.N. members, U.S. Delegate Henry Cabot Lodge, as the current president of the Security Council, set a meeting for this week.

Even South Africa's rabidly nationalistic Afrikaans press was having second thoughts. The day before the riots, the Johannesburg Vaderland called for a "simpler and less hurtful pass system." The influential Cape Town Die Burger urged moderation on Prime Minister Verwoerd. But Verwoerd obstinately said that "nothing would be done" to abolish the pass laws, and belatedly discovered that the demonstrators at Sharpeville had "shot first," even though no one found arms on the Africans.

Mourning Day. Afraid of civil war and preparing for a showdown, the government canceled all leaves for the 20,000 members of the South African police, placed the members of auxiliary white defense forces on a stand-by alert. Indoor or outdoor meetings of more than twelve persons were declared illegal (exception: a political rally of 40,000 addressed by Prime Minister Verwoerd, who complained that most of the unanimous outside criticism came from "the ducktails of the political world .... Good and nice people are mostly quiet"). African political organizations were outlawed. Robert Sobukwe and eleven of his Pan-African aides surrendered and were, jailed. Albert Luthuli, leader of the more moderate African National Congress, was already under house arrest. Both organizations proclaimed a "day of mourning" for the dead (the police released the bodies a few at a time so that there could be no mass funeral). A work boycott by Africans was ordered, and strong-arm squads called "the Spoilers" walked the streets to keep Africans off the job. Cape Town docks, loading 20 ships, were crippled by a walkout of stevedores. On the Johannesburg exchange, gold stocks fell for a paper loss of $250 million in four days. Throngs of white South Africans, fearing disaster, lined "up for emigration data at the, information offices of Canada and Australia.

At week's end came the first giving of ground. South Africa's commissioner of police curtly announced that to relieve the "tremendous tension," police would no longer ask Africans to show--or arrest them for failure to carry--the hated passbooks. It represented the first major retreat by the government since the Nationalists won power at the polls twelve years ago. But just when everyone was about to credit Verwoerd's administration with coming to its senses, Defense Minister Francois Erasmus said that the police decision was "strictly temporary" until the "situation quieted." South Africa's course was still set for disaster.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.