An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and Its Massacre

by Philip Frankel

On March 21st, 1960, police opened fire on members of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) protesting peacefully in the Vaal Triangle township of Sharpeville against apartheid's iniquitous "pass laws". Sixty-nine people died. The shots fired that day in an obscure corner of South Africa reverberated around the world, and Sharpeville became the symbol of the evil of the apartheid system. For a variety of reasons this seminal event has never been systematically documented. The Wessels Commission of Inquiry established to investigate the matter never published a formal and final report that was satisfactory to all the parties, and in the four decades since the shooting, the massacre has been so mythologised and contorted to serve various political interests, that it precluded a thorough investigation. Philip Frankel's book goes a long way toward correcting that deficiency. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from policemen to survivors and families of victims, he tells the exciting and hitherto invisible story of this watershed moment in South Africa's experience. In doing so he reveals the dubious behaviour of the South African police, new findings on the role of the PAC, the extent and nature of casualties, and the parts played by a number of individuals whose behaviour in the vortex was critical to its tragic outcome. The book ends, fittingly, with the signing by the then-President Mandela, of South Africa's first democratic constitution at the site of the massacre.

263 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2001

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good deep analysis of the notorious 1960 massacre at Sharpeville, Transvaal, in the old Union of South Africa. Inevitably, when a government begins shooting people in the streets it has lost its mandate to rule and its collapse is but a matter of time. So it was here, when South Africa's Nationalist Party and its apartheid ideology where exposed in full bankruptcy. That it did not fade for another thirty years, thanks to totalitarian security measures and the divided reactions of the West, was only postponing the inevitable. Frankel uses the adjective "ordinary" because it was not a genocidal bloodbath; the Nats were not Nazis, and even the Americans in My Lai were far more brutal. But the white "right" to rule for the "Bantu's own good" was mortally wounded on March 21st of said year. The bullets of Sharpeville were a longterm lead poisoning that ensured apartheid's timely expiration.

[Wessel van Rensburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly even handed - even if missing some nuances of Afrikaner - English tension. This is complimented by comprehensive and some original research.