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eyewitness accounts of the Sharpeville massacre 1960

The day of the Massacre, mourning the dead and getting over the shock of the event © Baileys African History Archive (BAHA)
Tom Petrus, author of ‘My Life Struggle’, Ravan Press…

“The aeroplanes were flying high and low. The people were throwing their hats to the aeroplanes. They thought the aeroplanes were playing with them. They didn’t realise that death was near…Fortunately for me, they (the police) could not shoot on the side where I was standing. That was how I managed to get away.

People were running in all directions…some couldn’t believe that people had been shot, they thought they had heard firecrackers. Only when they saw the blood and dead people, did they see that the police meant business.”

Humphrey Tyler, assistant editor, Drum magazine…

“We went into Sharpeville the back way, behind a grey police car and three Saracens. As we drove through the fringes of the township many people shouted the Pan-Africanist slogan ‘Izwe Lethu’, which means ‘Our Land’, or gave the thumbs-up ‘freedom’ salute and shouted ‘Afrika!’.

They were grinning, cheerful, and nobody seemed to be afraid…There were crowds in the streets as we approached the police station. There were plenty of police, too, wearing more guns and ammunition than uniforms…An African approached…and said he was the local Pan-Africanist leader. He told (us) his organisation was against violence and that the crowd was there for a peaceful demonstration…The crowd seemed perfectly amiable. It certainly never crossed our minds that they would attack us or anybody…

There were sudden shrill cries of ‘Izwe Lethu’ – women’s voices it sounded – from near the police, and I could see a small section of the crowd swirl around the Saracens and hands went up in the Africanist salute. Then the shooting started. We heard the chatter of a machine gun, then another, then another. There were hundreds of women, some of them laughing. They must have thought the police were firing blanks. One woman was hit about ten yards from our car. Her companion, a young man, went back when she fell. He thought she had stumbled. Then he turned her over and saw that her chest had been shot away. He looked at the blood on his hand and said: ‘My God, she’s gone!’ Hundreds of kids were running, too.

One little boy had on an old blanket coat, which he held up behind his head, thinking, perhaps, that it might save him from the bullets. Some of the children, hardly as tall as the grass, were leaping like rabbits. Some were shot, too. Still the shooting went on. One of the policemen was standing on top of a Saracen, and it looked as though he was firing his gun into the crowd. He was swinging it around in a wide arc from his hip as though he were panning a movie camera. Two other officers were with him, and it looked as if they were firing pistols. Most of the bodies were strewn on the road running through the field in which we were. One man, who had been lying still, dazedly got to his feet, staggered a few yards, then fell in a heap. A woman sat with her head cupped in her hands.

One by one the guns stopped.

Before the shooting, I heard no warning to the crowd to disperse. There was no warning volley. When the shooting started it did not stop until there was no living thing in the huge compound in front of the police station. The police have claimed they were in desperate danger because the crowd was stoning them. Yet only three policemen were reported to have been hit by stones – and more than 200 Africans were shot down. The police also have said that the crowd was armed with ‘ferocious weapons’, which littered the compound after they fled.

I saw no weapons, although I looked very carefully, and afterwards studied the photographs of the death scene. While I was there I saw only shoes, hats and a few bicycles left among the bodies. The crowd gave me no reason to feel scared, though I moved among them without any distinguishing mark to protect me, quite obvious with my white skin. I think the police were scared though, and I think the crowd knew it.”

www.sahistory.org.za/eyewitness-accounts-sharpeville-massacre-1960