What Happened
Shooting at Sharpeville. By Ambrose Reeves. (Gollancz, 18s.) ONCE, driving in Johannesburg on a Sunday afternoon, I was involved in an accident with an African cyclist who ran into the back mud- guard of my car and was flung heavily on to the ground. The man appeared to have been gravely injured; his adolescent son, who had been riding with him, wept hysterically; and in a moment a crowd of people had gathered, to stare, point, and —depending on the colour of their skins—to put the blame on me or on the cyclist. It was an extremely unpleasant experience, as such acci- dents always are. But perhaps the worst moment of all was when a young white policeman finally arrived, pushed the crowd away and then, looking down at the bleeding, unconscious African lying sprawled on the tar, said just one word about him --'Swine!'
Take that policeman, give him a Sten gun, line him up with a company of his fellows in front of a crowd of Africans demonstrating outside a police station, and Sharpeville, or something like it, is almost certain to occur. And when the shooting is over, and two hundred and fifty dead and wounded Africans lie sprawled in heaps around the police station, that policeman might emerge and say about the victim lying nearest to him, 'Hierdie hond--ons het horn niks gemaak nie; kyk, hy kott nog.' (`This dog, we've done nothing to him; look, he's still chewing.) The remark is quoted from the evidence of one of the witnesses before the commission of inquiry appointed by the South African Government, after the Sharpeville shooting.
The commission has not yet delivered its re- port; in the meantime we have this book by the Bishop of Johannesburg, who had tO flee the country as a result of the events arising out of Sharpeville, and who was later formally deported from the Union. (The book has a foreword by Chief Luthuli, who has himself been banished to a rennote area of the country.) Essentially, the book presents the case against the South African police; a case which it seems difficult indeed to refute, if only because of the presence in the book of a remarkable series of thirty photographs taken before, during and after the shooting.
One must say that it seems Pretty clear that Sharpeville waS not deliberately chosen by the Government to be the scene for a swift, brutal, exemplary action which would Put the fear of God into all the Africans taking part in the anti- Government campaign. The senior police officer
present did not even give the order to his men to open fire; apparently they did it of their own volition. (And there were many among them„ let it be said, who did not fire at all. The officer in charge does, however, bear a heavy responsi- bility for having ordered his men to line up and load their weapons.) Again, from the African side, the text and photographs seem to show that there was no intention among them of storming the police station at the time of firing; or even of rioting in the way that mobs were to do in other townships in the days that followed upon Sharpeville. The people in the crowd (many of whom had been forced to join the demonstration by intimidators, and among whom were manY women and children) were hoping that a 'big man' was corning from Pretoria to tell them something about the 'pass laws.' While they waited, they sang, shouted slogans occasionallY• and cheered when aeroplanes buzzed them in ao attempt to get them to disperse. So little dangerous was the crowd that two white photo- graphers moved about in it quite untouched, taking their photographs; and policemen came out of their perimeter, went right into the crowd to arrest individual 'troublemakers,' and were able without being molested to carry their pus' oncrs back inside the wire that surrounded the station. The crowd pushed against the wire fence in places, but never strongly enough to push it over; a few stones seem to have been thrown. It was under these circumstances that, sud- denly, at a range of some yards, the police °per
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fire with their revolvers, Sten guns and rifles. There is no clear evidence as to what precipitated the firing; it is not known which of the policemen was the first to fire. In about forty seconds, seven hundred rounds were fired; during the volleY, some of the police emptied the magazines of their guns, reloaded them and exhausted them a second time. Of the Africans who were killed or wounded, over 70 per cent, were shot in the back, as they fled. No attempt had been made, before the firing, to disperse the crowd by word of cony mand; no use was made of truncheons, tear-gas or fire-hoses; no warning shots were fired.
And it is just because the slaughter was so gratuitous, so unexpected, so 'accidental' in a sense, that Sharpeville is all the more terrible a condemnation of the South African Government and of many of those who enforce its laws. To say that the Government did not deliberately seek the massacre is not to exonerate it in anY way; it is to damn it and its policies all the more completely. Because the South African Govern- ment, its servants, and its supporters deny the full humanity of the country's black citizens, something like Sharpeville had to happen; if it had not happened then, it would have happened later; if not there, elsewhere. Because it has har petted once, it can happen again. And again. Has the South African Government learned nothing from Sharpeville? Only one thing, it seems. Here a book has been published in which the photographs alone show us how the massacre took place. That, at least, is not going to be per- mitted again. Before mounting their latest large' scale 'police' operation in Pondoland, the authorities have taken good care to remove from the area all pressmen and photographers. Pondo- land is cut off from the rest of the country; no the police can do what they like inside it, and there is no one there to record what they might do. We have all the more reason, then, to be grateful to the Bishop of Johannesburg, who worked devotedly when he was in the Union to help the people of Sharpeville, and who has now' let us have this view of what happened there.
DAN JAMBE
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