Sharpeville Massacre Quotes

The Marikana Massacre, as it has come to be known, was the deadliest single police action since apartheid police killed 69 people and injured 180 at Sharpeville in March 1960. As at Marikana, many of those killed at Sharpeville were shot in the back as they tried to run away from police fire. Eight of the dead were women and 10 were children. How did we get to such a low point in South Africa, in a free and democratic country in which the party of Nelson Mandela was in power? How did we get to a point where only one government leader, defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, has had the guts not only to go to the bereaved communities but also to apologise? What happened to us? The Marikana Massacre underlined everything that was wrong about the new South Africa. If there is in any way a nadir for our failures over the past 21 years of our democracy, this was it. Marikana exposed the myth of black economic empowerment (BEE) as a tool that does not actually empower workers and communities but creates a small, mollycoddled, arrogant, selfish black elite.

In the law which Parliament passed establishing the commission, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, it was enough for the applicant to satisfy the main conditions laid down: The act for which amnesty was required should have happened between 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, and 1994, when President Mandela was inaugurated as the first democratically elected South African head of state. The act must have been politically motivated. Perpetrators did not qualify for amnesty if they killed because of personal greed, but they did qualify if they committed the act in response to an order by, or on behalf of, a political organization such as the former apartheid state and its satellite Bantustan homelands, or a recognized liberation movement such as the ANC or PAC. The applicant had to make a full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to the offense for which amnesty was being sought. The rubric of proportionality had to be observed—that the means were proportional to the objective. If those conditions were met, said the law, then amnesty “shall” be granted. Victims had the right to oppose applications for amnesty by trying to demonstrate that these conditions had not been met, but they had no right of veto over amnesty. Nothing was said in the law about remorse—an omission that upset many of us at first until we realized that the legislature had been a great deal wiser than we had at first thought.