Sharpeville and Johnnesburg, South Africa
The Hertzog Government achieved a major goal in 1931 when the British Parliament passed the Westminster Statute, which removed the last remainders of British legal authority over South Africa. Racial segregation, sanctioned by law, was widely practised there before, but the National Party gained office in 1948 and extended the policy, giving it a formal name. Apartheid (i.e apartness in Afrikaans) was a policy that governed relations between the nation’s White minority and non-White majority; it sanctioned racial segregation, and political & economic discrimination, against non-Whites. The implementation of apartheid was made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified all South Africans as Bantu (Blacks), Coloured (mixed race) or White. Later a fourth category was added: Asian (Indian and Pakistani).
The Group Areas Act of 1950 established urban residential and business sections for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses or owning land there. In practice this Act completed a process that had begun with similar Land Acts adopted much earlier; the end result was to set aside 80+% of South Africa’s land for the White minority. To help enforce the segregation of the races and limit Blacks from going into White areas, the government strengthened the existing Pass Laws that required non-Whites to carry documents authorising their presence in restricted areas. Other laws forbade most social contacts between the races, authorised segregated public facilities, established separate educational standards, restricted jobs according to race, limited non-White labour unions, and denied non-White participation in government.
Under the Bantu Authorities Act 1951 the government re-created tribal organisations for Black Africans, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantustans i.e Black homelands. Later on the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act made every Black South African, irrespective of actual residence, a citizen of one of the Bantustans, thereby excluding Blacks from the South African body politic. 4 of the Bantustans were granted independence as republics, and the remaining had varying degrees of self-government; but all remained politically and economically dependent on South Africa.
The mass burials that followed the Sharpeville Massacre
Reports helped focus international criticism on the nation’s apartheid policy. South Africa was forced to withdraw from the British Commonwealth in 1961 when it became clear that other British countries found apartheid abhorrent. In response to the resulting international economic sanctions, South Africa's government abolished the Pass Laws in 1986, although Blacks were still prohibited from living in some White areas and the police won broad emergency powers.
A new constitution enfranchising Blacks and other racial groups was not adopted until 1993 and took effect in 1994. All-race national elections in 1994 produced a coalition government with a Black majority led by anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president. Yet even after apartheid formally ended, racism continued.
How appropriate that following the dismantling of apartheid, President Nelson Mandela chose Sharpeville as the site for signing the country’s new constitution into law in 1996.
Conclusion 3.5+ million Black South Africans had forced to live on arbitrary reservations called Bantustans, depriving them of political power and proper incomes. Yet amongst the many oppressive conditions in the nation, it was the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 that horrified anti-apartheid supporters and caused them to go into exile.
Even at the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, White South Africans (10% of the 58 million citizens) owned c90% of South Africa's land as a result of all the Land Acts. By 2018 there were c190,000 South Africans ex-pats living in Australia, but that is a story for another time.
What was the mid C20th history of apartheid in South Africa? I recommend and thank Britannica, Human Rights Canada and The Conversation.
The Hertzog Government achieved a major goal in 1931 when the British Parliament passed the Westminster Statute, which removed the last remainders of British legal authority over South Africa. Racial segregation, sanctioned by law, was widely practised there before, but the National Party gained office in 1948 and extended the policy, giving it a formal name. Apartheid (i.e apartness in Afrikaans) was a policy that governed relations between the nation’s White minority and non-White majority; it sanctioned racial segregation, and political & economic discrimination, against non-Whites. The implementation of apartheid was made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified all South Africans as Bantu (Blacks), Coloured (mixed race) or White. Later a fourth category was added: Asian (Indian and Pakistani).
The Group Areas Act of 1950 established urban residential and business sections for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses or owning land there. In practice this Act completed a process that had begun with similar Land Acts adopted much earlier; the end result was to set aside 80+% of South Africa’s land for the White minority. To help enforce the segregation of the races and limit Blacks from going into White areas, the government strengthened the existing Pass Laws that required non-Whites to carry documents authorising their presence in restricted areas. Other laws forbade most social contacts between the races, authorised segregated public facilities, established separate educational standards, restricted jobs according to race, limited non-White labour unions, and denied non-White participation in government.
Under the Bantu Authorities Act 1951 the government re-created tribal organisations for Black Africans, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantustans i.e Black homelands. Later on the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act made every Black South African, irrespective of actual residence, a citizen of one of the Bantustans, thereby excluding Blacks from the South African body politic. 4 of the Bantustans were granted independence as republics, and the remaining had varying degrees of self-government; but all remained politically and economically dependent on South Africa.
Bullets in the back and clubs on the head continued
at the Sharpeville anti-apartheid demonstration, 1960
Getty Images
The wounded lay on the ground after the dead bodies had been removed
in Sharpeville, 1960.
Britannica
The Pan-Africanist Congress/PAC created in 1959. In Mar 1960, the PAC organised a countrywide demonstration regarding the abolition of South Africa’s Pass Laws. Many thousands of Blacks gathered near a police station at Sharpeville, c50 km south of Johannesburg, instructed to surrender their Passes and to invite arrest. After the demonstrations began, the police violently opened fire with sub-machine guns and sten guns ; c69 Blacks were killed and 180+ wounded, including 50 women and children. A state of emergency was declared in South Africa, 11,000+ people were detained, and the PAC and ANC were outlawed.
msn news
Reports helped focus international criticism on the nation’s apartheid policy. South Africa was forced to withdraw from the British Commonwealth in 1961 when it became clear that other British countries found apartheid abhorrent. In response to the resulting international economic sanctions, South Africa's government abolished the Pass Laws in 1986, although Blacks were still prohibited from living in some White areas and the police won broad emergency powers.
A new constitution enfranchising Blacks and other racial groups was not adopted until 1993 and took effect in 1994. All-race national elections in 1994 produced a coalition government with a Black majority led by anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president. Yet even after apartheid formally ended, racism continued.
How appropriate that following the dismantling of apartheid, President Nelson Mandela chose Sharpeville as the site for signing the country’s new constitution into law in 1996.
Conclusion 3.5+ million Black South Africans had forced to live on arbitrary reservations called Bantustans, depriving them of political power and proper incomes. Yet amongst the many oppressive conditions in the nation, it was the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 that horrified anti-apartheid supporters and caused them to go into exile.
Even at the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, White South Africans (10% of the 58 million citizens) owned c90% of South Africa's land as a result of all the Land Acts. By 2018 there were c190,000 South Africans ex-pats living in Australia, but that is a story for another time.
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17 comments:
I remember Sharpeville, but I didn't truly appreciate the details until later, when the South Africans came to Australia by the thousands.
Hello Hels, When I was in college, apartheid was a big issue, and many people were protesting to have the school remove pro-apartheid investments from its portfolio. That was also about the time people were scrutinizing mutual funds and the like, and the idea of virtue-based investing (anti-pollution, anti-apartheid, pro-feminist, pro-gay, pro-minorities, etc.) started to take hold.
--Jim
Maybe it is an anniversary of some kind as I listened to a podcast about the massacre a few days ago. While now all South Africans are equal and I can't see anything like that happening again, it is still a country with a monstrous wealth gap.
Over the years I have had some acquaintances with Black South Africans and the effect of these awful times on them has been profound. When we think abut our own aboriginal people it seems tome that we should feel the same shame that white south Africans should feel for their past . I am not at all sure that it was good for Australia to welcome these people after all they didn't want to stay and build a new country . I wonder why that might be ??? :(
Sydneysider
peoples' memories of Sharpeville 1960 depended largely on whether the family had a tv by 1960 or not. Newspapers and radios were excellent for news, but only tv left vivid images on our brains.
By the way, it is interesting that Sydney has more South Africans than Perth or Melbourne.
Parnassus
I am assuming that you were in college quite a long time ago! Nonetheless it still shocks me that many people had to work hard and loud to have the school remove pro-apartheid investments from its portfolio! How slowly we all move :(
Andrew
the anniversary was March 2020, 60 years after the Sharpeville Massacre. I assume the memorial ceremony was delayed because of Covid.
But we need to remember an earlier anniversary memorial (March 1985). On Sharpeville's 25th anniversary, police opened fire on a crowd of people gathered in Langa township. The crowd had been at a funeral of one the six who had just been slain by the apartheid police. They were heading towards the funeral house when the police blocked the road with tanks and ordered the crowd to disperse. When the crowd stayed, police shot at the crowd, killing 35 people and wounded dozens in this, the Langa massacre.
mem
Good on you for mentioning that! The White Australia Policy had been in place until 1973 when the Whitlam Labour government ended that offensive policy forever. But there had been no positive policy of multiculturalism in Australia after 1960, at the very time when anti-Apartheid South Africans had to go into exile.
How ironic; anti-Apartheid whites in South Africa HAD to leave and were warmly welcomed into Australia BECAUSE they were white!
Oi Hels, algo triste e espero que não se repita já mais.
Hi Hels - there have been massacres in South Africa and which are still going on. I've got some documentation from the Soweto riots that occurred just before I arrived in South Africa, as a naive English woman. Publications including The Drum magazine with some information from the Sharpeville and Soweto era. It's a very complicated history ... all the best - Hilary
Luiz
*nod* it was unbelievably tragic, for the families who were murdered and for the rest of the black South African community who learned very quickly the type of rule they lived under.
The tragedies certainly continued. In June 1976, 20,000 black Soweto school children took part in protests and when the police stopped shooting, 700+ children were dead.
The 1985 Langa massacre I already mentioned. Black crowds were heading towards a funeral house when the police blocked the road with guns and shot into the crowd, killing 35 people and wounded dozens.
Hilary
I didn't know, or didn't remember that you had lived in South Africa. The closest _I_ ever got was having close South African friends in Melbourne and then living in an Israeli hospital where spouse and I were the only non-South Africans in residence.
And thanks for the reference to Drum Magazine. It will be very valuable reading.
Thank you for writing this Hels. It's a testament to how negligent the Apartheid education system was that the first I heard of this massacre was in my first year of university when we woke up on 21 March 1991 to white crosses erected all over the lawns on east and west campus of Wits University. We were still under Apartheid in 1991 but many struggle cadres were at Wits and it was an awakening to me. Throughout that first year I would learn all about what we hadn't been taught. You mention above about having a TV in 1960. My mother only arrived in SA from France in 1961 at age 9, so she did not know of the massacre but she lived through 16 June 1976 and taught me about that (even though we were in England at the time).
Mandy
If it wasn't for my South African friends who moved to Melbourne in the early 1960s, I also would not have heard of Sharpeville until decades later. In Australia knew about massacres and crises in Vietnam, USA, Soviet Union, Hungary etc... but South Africa's apartheid secrets seemed closed to international press. Worse still, the military secrecy meant banks continued to lend money, the oil tankers kept arriving and expensive weapons systems remained in abundant supply.
The shock is that South Africans were prevented from knowing what happened, and were prevented from becoming involved, from 1960 until the government changed in the early 1990s. It reminds me of Germans citizens never having heard about the extermination camps until 1945.
https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2019/06/25/apartheids-secrets-and-lies/
That book looks fascinating. My primary area of study was the violence in South Africa at that time and I think this book will shed a lot of light on that.
What The History Books Don't Tell You About The Sharpeville Tragedy (Black Culture) | History Books
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.
Article
It seems that people who were not closely involved in the Sharpeville tragedy could not truly understand the eternal pain caused by that day in March 1960. It was like the U.S massacre in Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuking hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in 1945. Everyone said it was terrible and must never happen again, but only the Japanese are still paying the price.
I agree that without the Sharpeville massacre, S.A may not have a modern _national_ human rights law system and possibly no binding _international_ human rights obligations that can be enforced. Quite a lot certainly changed following the world’s moral outrage at the killings but has the nation reached the moral and legal standards you would like yet?
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