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The Sharpeville Massacre: Defeat or Backfire?
In 1960, the apartheid system was being expanded by the South African government through a system of obligatory passes that even women now had to carry, or risk being arrested and charged. These new requirements were being challenged by a campaign of nonviolent defiance that was quickly gaining momentum.
On March 21, 1960, in the township of Sharpeville, over 5,000 people gathered to offer themselves up at the police station, for openly refusing to carry the pass books. The police opened fire on the unarmed protesters, killing 69 people, many shot in the back as they tried to flee.
That event is now being remembered each year through the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. That day also marked a watershed in the history of resistance movements in the country, and indeed the whole of Africa.
“The Sharpeville Massacre was the decisive factor in the conclusion by principal leaders in the South African liberation movement that nonviolence could no longer work”, wrote Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer, in Guns and Gandhi in Africa. Likewise, other leaders in national liberation struggles across Africa concluded from the event that only clandestine armed resistance was going to be effective. It was said that the savagery of the apartheid regime had sealed the path of non-violence, proving it ineffective, and that the struggle could only continue through force of arms.
But what the leaders of the Defiance Campaign failed to realise at the time was how much the centres of power in Johannesburg were shaken and divided in the event's immediate aftermath. Foreign investors frantically pulled millions of pounds of capital from the country, quickly draining national reserves. For the first time ever, the UN security council called on South Africa to “abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination”. The whole world stood in condemnation of the unwarranted massacre. South Africa was soon excluded from the Commonwealth.
The Sharpeville Massacre clearly backfired. The repression severely discredited and weakened the regime. That the Defiance Campaign had reached such a turning point was hardly the sign of an ineffective strategy. One of the core dynamics of nonviolent action was kicking into action: repression of nonviolent resisters severely undermined the regime’s legitimacy.
Our reading of History has immense consequences. As it were, the armed wings of the Afrian National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), operating mostly in exile, were largely ineffectual for decades, while exacting a formidable toll on the movement. Armed groups in South Africa never presented a serious military challenge to the apartheid regime. The apartheid system was taken down nearly thirty years later only when hundreds of thousands resorted to mass non-cooperation, boycotts, and direct action, supported by international divestment campaigns. In the end, what proved decisive in South Africa were largely nonviolent mass popular movements.
"The movement for racial equality in South Africa was a protracted struggle that lasted most of the twentieth century, with the final push touched off by an incident in Soweto in June 1976, when students demonstrating in protest of the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction were met with lethal force. The murder of students by state forces sparked a nationwide rebellion lasting into 1977 that, while unsuccessful in toppling the apartheid system, catalyzed a groundswell of grassroots activism that sustained unarmed insurgencies in the townships in the 1980s. By the end of the 1980s, bans on political organizations were lifted; political prisoners were released, including Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned since 1962; and pathways for a negotiated transition to a unitary, nonracial democratic state were blazed. In April 1994 the African National Congress (ANC) won the first-ever universal national elections in South Africa, and Mandela was inaugurated as president."
— Kurt Schock, Unarmed Insurrections.
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Philippe Duhamel
interTactica — un carnet pour la libération.
This was the fifth instalment in our series devoted to popularizing the concepts of nonviolent struggle. A one-page handout of this text is available as a pdf. Your suggestions on how to improve this draft are welcome.
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