Few events loom larger in the history of the apartheid regime than those of the afternoon of March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville, South Africa. Throughout the 1950s, South African blacks intensified their resistance against the oppressive apartheid system. Sharpeville, home to 26,000 blacks within the larger town of Vereeniging, located south of Johannesburg, seemed an unlikely setting for a watershed moment in the history of apartheid resistance.
Before the massacre, white officials considered Sharpeville a small, insignificant, and even a “model” black township.
However, the events of March 21, 1960 in this small insignificant black town could be a turning point for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Welcome to today’s video, where we will go into one of the bloodiest massacres of the apartheid regime in colonized South Africa.
Before we delve into the events of the Sharpeville Massacre, let us first understand the context of apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced by the government of South Africa from 1948 to 1994. This system institutionalized discrimination against non-white citizens of South Africa, denying them basic human rights, such as the right to vote, own property, or even travel freely.
In the 1950s, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was gaining momentum, with many people calling for an end to the discriminatory policies of the government.
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 of the 1950s, under the Boer regime of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, that the passbook became 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 hard-fisted police must 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 will be hauled off to jail, without notice to his employer or family and fined or imprisoned. Murders go unsolved while the courts were jammed with past offenders.
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