Today is Human Rights Day. It commemorates the massacre in the township of Sharpeville on Monday, 21 March 1960: a historic event that arguably signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid.
The background and details of that fateful day are now perhaps more pertinent than ever, given the growing problem of fake news and media distortion and manipulation.
Had it not been for a journalist, Humphrey Tyler, and a photographer, Ian Berry – whose names seldom feature in discussions about Sharpeville – the police version of having defended themselves against an armed and brutal anti-white mob would probably have been accepted as fact.
In any event, it took 12 days — until 2 April — before Tyler’s factual report was published because the professedly liberal Rand Daily Mail rejected it. And there were no other daily newspapers that would consider it.
“The Rand Daily Mail said they had a ‘factual report’ from the police. And, as I wrote later, it was very different from mine,” Humphrey Tyler told me in an interview in 2015.
As he and Berry decided on how best to ensure that the story and pictures got out, they placed copies of the text and the negatives in the safe of a trusted lawyer.
The only publication willing to publish the report was the Liberal Party-supporting Contact, “South Africa’s non-racial fortnightly newspaper”.
The 2 April edition sold out quickly but was then banned by the government, which declared a state of emergency and began detaining hundreds of activists.
But the monthly Drum magazine, for whom both Tyler and Berry worked, had the Sharpeville photographs that confirmed Tyler’s report. They rapidly made their way around the world.
Belatedly, the security police also swooped on the offices of Drum to seize any remaining copies of the magazine that had appeared on 21 March.
On that front cover, Drum carried a picture of Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) members and their leader, the academic Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, bearing the banner of the party that was only 11 months old at the time.
The headline read: “Who are the Africanists?” By the time the police arrived, the larger print run had already been distributed and almost sold out.
At the time, Drum, staffed by the likes of journalists such as Casey Motsisi, Can Themba, E’skia Mphahlele and Nat Nakasa, prided itself on being the only publication that reported on “what was really going on in the country”.
Having signalled in its latest edition that the PAC should be taken seriously, Humphrey Tyler, the assistant editor, called in for tea with Sobukwe on 18 March to check on the planned 21 March protest against the dompas (dumb pass), a form of ID that had to be produced on demand by every black adult.
Sobukwe confirmed that there would be a call to all black adults to hand in their “passes” to police stations on 21 March and to make themselves available for arrest.
Tyler was concerned that the PAC, having only recently broken away from the African National Congress (ANC), lacked the organisational capacity for such a national protest.
Drum may have overplayed the issue with its front cover and bigger print run. But Sobukwe seemed confident that the dompas was so widely hated that the masses would turn out without their documents or peacefully hand them in at police stations.
If the pass laws were then not scrapped, a mass strike would follow. Again, Sobukwe stressed, it would be peaceful.
On the Monday morning, peace did reign. Sobukwe presented himself, without a pass to a police station and was duly arrested along with several supporters.
There were hundreds of protesters, not the envisaged thousands. Drum staff, having completed the latest edition, had also left the office where Ian Berry was busy cleaning his photographic equipment.
Aware that the PAC had made inroads into townships such as Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, Tyler borrowed the editor’s car and together with Ian Berry drove to Sharpeville.
He came across what he later described as something of a carnival atmosphere, despite the heavily armed police and their Saracen armoured cars around the local police station.
In his 1995 memoir, Life in the Time of Sharpeville, he wrote that “people were grinning, cheerful, and nobody seemed afraid… It was like a Sunday outing, except we knew that Major At Spengler, head of the Rand Security Branch, was in the front car and that there were bullets in the Saracen’s guns.”
Tyler and Berry walked freely among a crowd they estimated at perhaps 3,000, “loosely gathered” around the police station and the Saracen armoured cars, “with some kids playing”.
Nothing seemed likely to happen and they were thinking of leaving when the first shot rang out, followed by what Tyler described as the “toc-toc-toc-toc” of sten gun fire.
He noticed a policeman standing on top of a Saracen, swinging his sten gun from side to side as he fired into the fleeing crowd. Berry was on the ground or kneeling, shooting picture after picture. Finishing both rolls of film, he ran back to Tyler at the car, shouting, “Get out of here before they [the police] get my film”.
The police later claimed that the crowd had been armed with “ferocious weapons” and that these littered the area around the police station after the crowd had fled.
As Tyler noted — and Berry’s photographs confirmed — what was left behind were “only shoes and hats and a few bicycles among the bodies”.
Other journalists and later inquiries confirmed Humphrey Tyler’s report and the generally accepted official figure is that 69 people died and some 180 were wounded, the overwhelming number shot in the back.
But the fact that a new political formation could rally numbers at such relatively short notice clearly concerned the security establishment and the government.
An iron fist cracked down, and nowhere more so than in the remote hill country of the Transkei where another new formation had come into being – the Intaba (mountain) movement.
Less than two months after the massacre at Sharpeville, on 6 June 1960, Intaba called a hilltop meeting. The apartheid authorities were also invited to hear and discuss community grievances.
The details of what happened on that day at Ngquza Hill near the rural centre of Lusikisiki may never be fully known.
It took nearly 40 years and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to discover that the meeting had been broken up with gunfire and airdropped teargas. At least 11 people died.
There were no journalists present at Ngquza Hill. No photographs. And no need for the authorities to even invent a fictitious scenario.
Humphrey Tyler, who went on to hold several senior editorial posts, died at his home in the Eastern Cape in 2016; Ian Berry became an internationally acclaimed photographer and lives in London. DM
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Do you really have so little left to say. What are the deal for them
Mea culpa. Not having read, or been aware of, the recent book on the Sharpeville massacre by historian William Worger (written with Nancy Clark) I repeated the official casualty figures for the dead and wounded. But scrupulous research by Worger and Clark reveals that, in fact, 91 men, women and children were killed and “at least 238 wounded, some of them crippled for life”. Professor Worger informs me that residents of Sharpeville have also listed all the names of the dead and wounded and wish to have the true numbers recognised.
However it would be most welcome if the modern media were as honest and embodied as much journalistic integrity as the media of old. The modern media are decidedly left leaning, they actively censor opinions that differ from theirs, they deceive, massage and omit to suit their narrative, they attack anyone who expresses contrary views and they seem to think their job is to manipulate public opinion until it matches theirs ( no matter how unethical their methods ) rather than to objectively report the facts and inform the reader’s opinion. A number of the writers on DM are particularly guilty of this.
I’d much rather have a ‘left-leaning’ media than the fascist-leaning ones like Fux News in the States and the Daily Mail/Sun/Express in England (mainly owned by right wing billionaires) who manipulate the serfs and keep them in awe of crooks like Trump, Johnson and the like. Maybe even Jooste here…
How about a media that just reports the news in a factual and unemotional manner without journalists’ personal opinions, so that the public can draw their own conclusions?
A day or two ago, one “Reply” to an article posted in the DM complained because there had been a factual piece written without comment by the author. You can’t have it both ways. In my day, a reporter wrote a factual piece; senior staff (supposedly older and wiser), wrote “editorial” comment pieces, set aside in their own section, which tended to depend entirely on the paper’s political slant.
What’s wrong with a piece written with the author’s political slant anyway? Readers have their own opinions and are surely intelligent enough to extract what they wish to take from the source of where they’ve just been watching or reading from.
Confirms what Neville Alexander at a public discourse in his opening remark said … about there being no such thing as ‘objectivity’ !
You’ll never get that unless the owners give them free range, which they won’t. Even the BBC has been scared into submission by the fascist far right wing of the Tory party in the UK.
Free reign? It’s not where they go but what they’re allowed to say when they get there.
James, what makes you think it is only the “decidely left leaning” media that does this?
It’s just the way some ‘minds’ lean … as during apartheid … when they would have you believe … apparently no one voted for it ! It is what an American commentator Beinart calls American hubris … which has infected a lot of minds everywhere … especially via the ‘mainstream’ media.
Sharpeville was a disgrace, and the political spin to try and cover it up was even more disgraceful. A modicum of honesty at the time, apology, compensation and forgiveness would have been the humane thing to do.
The numbers were actually much higher.
The book “Voices of Sharpeville”, reviewed in DM last year (‘Sharpeville: new research on 1960 South African massacre shows the number of dead and injured was massively undercounted. Published: November 28, 2023 3.24pm SAST’), updates the number of dead to “at least 91” and the number of injured to 281. They also provide many first-hand accounts from people who were there.
They do note that the source material is hard to find and hard to access. So much of our history remains buried!
The numbers were actually much higher.
The book “Voices of Sharpeville”, reviewed in DM last year (‘Sharpeville: new research on 1960 South African massacre shows the number of dead and injured was massively undercounted. Published: November 28, 2023 3.24pm SAST’), updates the number of dead to “at least 91” and the number of injured to 281. They also provide many first-hand accounts from people who were there.
They do note that the source material is hard to find and hard to access. So much of our history remains buried!
A human tragedy. I say human because it was almost inevitable that this large crowd assembling around a police station would result in a horror. Only a few weeks before the tragedy of Sharpeville happened, 4 white and 5 black policemen were stoned to death and mutilated under similar circumstances at Cato Manor in Natal.
I am white, but it makes no difference – if I was a angry/frightened policemen at Sharpeville with Cato Manor in mind, I can’t honestly say I would not have opened fire, too, and kept firing until the crowd was well scattered. It’s not a racial thing – I would not want to be disembowelled alive or stoned to death like those policemen, black and white, at Cato Manor. Not with gun in my hand.
Of course, the morality of the whole segregation and apartheid thing is another matter, but in real life awful things happen.
In the end, the victims’ martyrdom made the ANC into a global cause, after the ANC had dealt with the PAC whose efforts these were, if I remember back that far.
Your opening paragraph confirms what the IDF and Zionist spokespeople do daily … they ‘manufacture facts’ and take days to do so ! No ‘on the scene’ footage …only significantly later, once the ‘facts’ have been doctored (AI?) …to suit the regime narrative. When confronted with ‘facts’ they resort to ‘investigations’! Just take 1 example : the allegation that a handful of UN ‘staff’ were apparently involved in the Oct 7 massacre …. only made public once the IDF complicity in murders of UN staff was exposed. All part of a deliberate campaign (with US) to paint the UN operation in Palestine as being ‘unsavoury’ or ‘discredited’! The recent temporary ‘harbour’ to ship on food via ‘alternative’ sources (when adequate land access points exist -but restricted from use by Israel -to enable the genocide) forms part of an elaborate ‘plan’ to ‘neutralise’ the UN. The Zionist agenda has no ‘limits’ to its propaganda machinations! It also explains why so many local journalists have been assassinated (they have real ‘records’ – while the ‘international’ ones like BBC and CNN are excluded from operating in the occupied territories – but regularly and happily find regime spokespeople to promote their propaganda on air – without a single question being asked!). Maybe now that this ‘conspiracy’ is being exposed after decades of ‘monopoly’ by the assassination regime …things are getting uncomfortable for the regime …which is still unconditionally sponsored to the hilt by the US .
Oh for the days when journalists revealed the truth rather than co-operating in its obfuscation. BTW I remember you Terry when you worked for John Cornwell on the Observer Overseas Foreign News Service (OFNS). Is that still the same hat?
Stavanger Aftonblad, Ashai Shimbun, Al Ahram, Globe & Mail, Straits Times… remember?