THERE is a grave question – how long can President Jacob Zuma, his administration and the ANC escape comparison among the black electorate of the killings of black mineworkers by the police at Marikana on August 16 last year with the Sharpeville massacre, carried out by white police in March 1960?
If that were to happen, South Africa’s political milieu since the first democratic elections in April 1994 would suffer irreversible change.
Sharpeville ... Marikana. These two events of mass bloodletting by the forces of the state cannot avoid comparison: both what binds them together, and how they should be discriminated from each other.
The most obvious fact that discriminates them relates to time. The nuclear fallout from the massacre at Sharpeville near Vereeniging on the morning of March 21 1960 was instantaneous. True, that mass killing of 69 black political demonstrators in a few seconds took over 30 years to kill off the white minority dictatorship. But kill it, it did.
Instantly, the landscape of black political life in SA was “changed, changed utterly”, as the poet WB Yeats wrote about another violent event in his native Ireland at Easter 1916., in one of the greatest poems in the English language from the last century.
The peaceful, non-violent philosophy of political protest inherited by the ANC from the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, which had brought independence to Gandhi’s native India in 1947, was shot to pieces on that one day in South Africa.
The “winds of change” (in fact a hurricane) had blown.
In the state of emergency which followed soon after the dead of Sharpeville were taken to the mortuary, mass arrests took place, and in this great convocation of the political activists within prison walls, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was born – conceived in a political marriage between the SACP and the ANC – and so too Poqo (later to be called the Azanian National Liberation Army, AZANLA), the insurrectionary wing of the PAC, which had called and organised the demonstration at Sharpeville.
Marikana – Zuma’s Sharpeville
If that were to happen, South Africa’s political milieu since the first democratic elections in April 1994 would suffer irreversible change.
Sharpeville ... Marikana. These two events of mass bloodletting by the forces of the state cannot avoid comparison: both what binds them together, and how they should be discriminated from each other.
The most obvious fact that discriminates them relates to time. The nuclear fallout from the massacre at Sharpeville near Vereeniging on the morning of March 21 1960 was instantaneous. True, that mass killing of 69 black political demonstrators in a few seconds took over 30 years to kill off the white minority dictatorship. But kill it, it did.
Instantly, the landscape of black political life in SA was “changed, changed utterly”, as the poet WB Yeats wrote about another violent event in his native Ireland at Easter 1916., in one of the greatest poems in the English language from the last century.
The peaceful, non-violent philosophy of political protest inherited by the ANC from the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, which had brought independence to Gandhi’s native India in 1947, was shot to pieces on that one day in South Africa.
The “winds of change” (in fact a hurricane) had blown.
In the state of emergency which followed soon after the dead of Sharpeville were taken to the mortuary, mass arrests took place, and in this great convocation of the political activists within prison walls, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was born – conceived in a political marriage between the SACP and the ANC – and so too Poqo (later to be called the Azanian National Liberation Army, AZANLA), the insurrectionary wing of the PAC, which had called and organised the demonstration at Sharpeville.
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