The road to Sharpeville
Date
1986-09
Authors
Chaskalson, Matthew
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Abstract
The Sharpeville shootings are a landmark o-f the South African
past. People with only a fleeting knowledge of South African
history are aware of the events of 21 March 1960 and Sharpeville
Day is annually commemorated by opponents of apartheid all over
the world. Nevertheless, there is remarkably little awareness of
the local history of Vereeniging that led up to the shootings.
This history makes fascinating reading. For one of its
distinguishing characteristics was the success of the Vereeniging
Town Council's administration of its two African townships,
Sharpeville and Top Location. Throughout the 1950s Sharpeville
was recognised across the country as the model African township,
and the Council was able to censor almost all local African
political activity (1). In the light of this it was particularly
anomalous that the declaration of the State of Emergency in I960
should have been prompted by events in Sharpeville- However, most
accounts of the Sharpeville shootings have not even noticed this
anomaly, let alone offered any explanation for it (2). Rather,
they look at the background to the shootings only in terms of the
PAC's national campaign against the passes. It is a central
premise of this paper that such an approach to the problem of
explaining the Sharpeville shootings is inadequate- For it begs
the question of why it was in Sharpeville as opposed to anywhere
else in the Union that the PAC's campaign received its strongest
response, a question that can only be answered by examinining the
local history that led up to the shootings.
It is to this history, then, that I address myself in the
following paper. The paper's first two sections describe the
social and economic development of Vereeniging up to the 1950s
and the administration of its African townships. I then examine
tensions around police raids and rising rents that built up in
Vereeniging's townships over the 1950s, and relate these to
processes described in the first two sections. Finally I look at
the Council's removal of Top Location residents to Sharpeville in
1958/59, and show how the PAC was able to capitalise on the
residents' grievances relating to the removal and to the, issues
of raids and rent (3).
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented September, 1986
Keywords
Sharpeville (South Africa), South Africa. History, Vereeniging (South Africa). History, Industralization. South Africa. Vereeniging