Remembering Sharpeville: The Fight Against Pass Laws in South Africa

By Saths Cooper 

The sheer determination to shed this country of its notorious pass laws that the rapacious Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) introduced in the early 19th century and which the apartheid crime against humanity developed into neo-slavery, reached a crescendo with the peaceful anti-pass campaign launched by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) on the 21st of March 1960.

The PAC had parted ways with the ANC, which had also targeted the pass laws as a scourge and defilement of humanity.

The ANC president-general, Chief Albert John Mvumbi Lutuli, publicly burned his pass and urged Africans to burn theirs "in an orderly manner." 

Apartheid’s most articulate proponent, the Dutch-born Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd presided over his murderous regime’s arrest of the PAC’s founding president, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.

Sobukwe was subsequently detained in solitary confinement on Robben Island from the 3rd of May 1963 for six years after he had served a three-year sentence for incitement, when he had left his pass at home and led his supporters to Orlando Police Station in “positive action” against the phalanx of oppression suffered by all who were not classified as white.

Despite clear evidence that 91 Africans were massacred outside the Sharpeville Police Station, after police fired into the 5,000 unarmed citizens strong without warning at 1:30pm on that fateful Monday, and 238 being wounded, many in the back as they were fleeing, we still incorrectly record 65 years later that there were only 69 deaths, which was the number the apartheid police put out. Narratives are important, as they tend to colour our perceptions and influence our thinking and other behaviour, as it does when falsities are paraded abroad, especially to a White House influenced by white male oligarchs, and other influencers who cannot overcome their racial privilege, and seek retribution at whatever cost. What if the majority suffer more? Blame it on Mandela and his ilk: “Look Ma, I’m fine, doing better than I ever dreamed of. I’m white, racist, and can do what I please.”

Although PW Botha was forced to repeal the pass laws in 1986, creating the first grey housing area, and lifting the Immorality Act, the indelible scars of the pass laws, other gross illegalities and severe injury to fellow human beings that were committed on the majority in our wounded country remain. Yet, those who maintained and benefitted from our terrible past would want to block the history of our survival, and wish us to just forget the profound wounds that most of us suffer - black and white, urban and rural, rich and poor, starving and satisfied to the full. What we tend to overlook has an insidious way to creep up on us when we least expect it to.

Lest we forget, on the 8th April 1960 apartheid Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd, one of the handful of white male psychologists to claim that title on the southern tip of Africa, banned the ANC and PAC, forcing these liberation organisations into adopting sabotage and the armed struggle. Most of the leadership was banished, banned, exiled, or jailed.

The colonial conquest of our part of the world had been sealed with the Constitution of the Union of South Africa, after the Anglo-Boer war settlement which saw only white entitlement to:The land that was stolen from 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck, started Dutch settlement in what the Khoi called IIHui !Gaeb (where the clouds meet atop Table Mountain), what the Portuguese termed the Cape of Storms and renamed the Cape of Good Hope, the Great Trek, and their sequelae, which persist today.Rights as citizens, which were denied those who were not regarded as white, superior, humans; which some of them still seem to believe.Mineral, economic, other wealth that resides in power, gross inequality, inequity, the fruits of democracy, which are allowed without let to those who maintained and directly benefitted from colonialism and apartheid.

The World Bank repeats that “South Africa is the most unequal country in the world, with inequality in per capita consumption about 50 percent higher than the average for upper-middle-income countries. The country has made little progress in reducing inequality in recent years.

The main sources of inequality are inequality of opportunity and disparities in factor markets, with the legacy of apartheid playing a major role and access to jobs and land being severely constrained and uneven.”

Reversion to the apartheid horrors, while serial exclusion of the majority, including some 75% of youth, continues unabated, ignoring the harsh realities that my castle on the hilltop is worthless with shacks surrounding it, ignoring the listless hunger-driven eyes whose glance portends my demise, an unnatural distorted picture that these children are simply not a part of. We forget the 21st March 1960, June 16th 1976, and very recently 9th July 2021 and its aftermath.Orania, Kleinfontein, Balmoral, and the whites-only enclaves in Pretoria, and the rising whiteness in our Mother City, where a secessionist group is the latest to announce a visit to the White House.

A white-controlled trade union, a Pretoria company that styles itself as protecting a species at risk, a minority secessionist group, and other apartheid recidivists cannot continue to dominate our headlines when we confront the numerous problems that we do. Of poor governance, our country crumbling around us, largely supine leadership that fails to identify with its constituencies which struggle to survive, and an “I’m ok, Jack” mentality that those who are fortunate to have hold against those don’t.

The seething majority shows its might at critical times. The power of the powerless – pushed to the limits of complete exclusion, not knowing where the next meal is coming from, constantly being ignored, blamed – is retributive for THEM, while WE tend to quickly find ways to retain our privilege, unable to learn to be considerate and compassionate towards our those who are worse off through no fault of their own. It’s even more telling when the major partner of the ANC in government also declares that it’s also visiting the White House, as if it were another Perth run, defying the sovereignty of our Constitution and the very legislatures that they have sworn oaths of allegiance to, ushered in by the democracy they now find queasy.

No clearer indication of dissociating from the Preamble to and other Bill of Rights provisions contained in our Constitution that came into law 28 years ago, especially its Preamble where each of these public officers swore to:“Recognise the injustices of our past; Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”

Each public officer should at least pretend to“Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law; Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.” Perhaps they don’t believe that all of us are: “equally entitled to the rights, privileges and benefits of citizenship” or that “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.”

Perhaps their desire to retain economic and political control makes them immune to the sea of want and penury, that they would wish to banish to “townships” and other apartheid geography, so that their castles remain fortified, out of reach of but a small minority of black elite.

IOL