Anatomy of a Massacre:
JACOBSON, DAN
WRITERS and WRITING Anatomy of a Massacre Shooting at Sharpeville. By Ambrose Reeves. Houghton Mifflin. 141 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Dan Jacobson Author, "Evidence of Love," "No Further...
...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 coming from Pretoria to tell them something about the "pass 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...
...The senior police officer present did not even give the order to his men to open fire...
...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...
...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...
...look he's still chewing...
...And again...
...The crowd pushed against the wire in places, but never strongly enough to push it over...
...Pondoland is cut off from the rest of the country, so now the police can do what they like inside it and there is no one there to record their actions...
...It was an extremely unpleasant experience, as such accidents always are...
...or even of rioting in the way that mobs were to do in other townships in the days that followed upon Sharpeville...
...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...
...So little dangerous was the crowd, so uninflamed was it, that two white photographers moved about in it quite untouched, taking their photographs...
...Because it has happened once, it can happen again...
...The commission has not yet delivered its report...
...Policemen also went right into the crowd to arrest individual "trouble-makers" and were able, without being molested, to carry their prisoners back inside the wire fence that surrounded the station...
...a case which is difficult indeed to refute, if only because of the presence in the book of a remarkable series of 30 photographs taken before, during and after the shooting...
...It seems fairly 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 campaigns...
...During the volley, some of the police emptied the magazines of their guns, reloaded them and exhausted them a second time...
...Reviewed by Dan Jacobson Author, "Evidence of Love," "No Further West" Once, driving in Johannesburg on a Sunday afternoon, I was involved in an accident with an African cyclist who collided into the back mudguard of my car and was flung to the ground...
...his adolescent son...
...This, at least, is not going to be permitted again...
...But perhaps the worst moment of all was when a young white policeman finally arrived, pushed the crowd away and then, staring down at the bleeding, unconscious African lying sprawled on the tar, said just one word about him—"Swine...
...In a moment a crowd of people gathered, to stare, point and—depending on the color of their skins—to blame me or the cyclist...
...no use was made of truncheons, tear gas or fire hoses...
...And there were many among them—let it be said to their credit—who did not fire at all...
...There is no clear evidence as to what precipitated the firing...
...The book has a foreword by Chief Luthuli, an African leader who has himself been banished to a remote, rural area of the country...
...apparently they did it of their own volition...
...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 something like Sharpeville can all too easily occur...
...Only one thing, it seems...
...a few stones seem to have been thrown...
...It was under these circumstances that, suddenly, at a range of some yards, the police opened fire with their revolvers, Sten guns and rifles...
...Of the Africans who were killed or wounded, over 70 per cent were shot in the back, as they fled...
...And when the shooting is over, and 250 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 kond—ons het horn niks gemaak nie...
...This dog, we've done nothing to him...
...who had been riding with him, wept hysterically...
...If it had not happened then, it would have happened later...
...And it is just because the slaughter was so gratuitous, so unexpected, so "accidental" in a sense, that Sharpeville is a terrible condemnation of the South African Government and of many of those who enforce its laws...
...Here a book has been published in which the photographs alone show us how the massacre took place...
...The officer in charge does, however, bear a heavy responsibility 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...
...if not there, elsewhere...
...no warning shots were fired...
...In about 40 seconds, 700 rounds were fired...
...While they waited, they sang, shouted slogans occasionally and cheered when airplanes buzzed them in an attempt to get them to disperse...
...Has the South African Government learned anything from Sharpeville...
...Essentially, the book presents the case against the South African police...
...Before mounting their recent military "police" operation in Pondoland, the authorities took good care to remove from the area all reporters and photographers...
...Because the South African Government, its servants and its supporters deny the full humanity of the country's black citizens, something like Sharpeville had to happen...
...it is not known which of the policemen was the first to fire...
...kyk, hy kou nog...
...The man appeared to have been gravely injured...
...No attempt had been made, before the firing, to disperse the crowd by word of command...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 13
