newsHuman Rights Day 2026 – The slaughter at Sharpeville on March 21, 1960 must never be forgotten
With one almighty bang, the place-name of “Sharpeville” woke-up and then shook-up the world’s leaders to the horror of apartheid in March 1960. But over the years memories fade. Crimes are conveniently forgotten, or at lest put on the political back-burner. The South African political analyst TERRY BELL says that the world must never be allowed to forget what happened at a township a stone’s throw away from Johannesburg sixty six years ago.
Johannesburg, South Africa ( March 21) – – – Today, Human Right Day, we remember the 1960 massacre at Sharpeville. As we do so, let us demolish one myth and recall also the vital role played by principled journalists at the time. The myth is that 69 people died and several were injured. The confirmed reality: 91 men, women and children were definitely killed on the spot and at least 238 were wounded, some of them crippled for life.
The official death toll of 69 and a generally unspecified number of wounded was the official reaction after journalist Humphrey Tyler and photographer Ian Berry provided evidence of the massacre. The death toll of 69 was the minimum the police and state could get away with following a cursory body count in the overflowing mortuaries.
If Tyler and Berry had not been present on that fateful day south of Johannesburg, there might have been an even more effective minimisation of the deaths and mayhem unleashed by sten-gun wielding police atop Saracen armoured cars. Like other killings in usually more remote rural areas, the slaughter at Sharpeville might have ended as little more than another footnote in a catalogue of oppression. Instead, it became the trigger for a global campaign against apartheid.
Sharpeville: Politicians put Sharpeville, and other horrendous crimes against Africans, on the back burner. But those who were there will never forget what was done to them.
What should not be forgotten is that there were almost no media present at this large, peaceful protest, called by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). At the time, Tyler and Berry worked for the monthly Drum magazine that claimed to be “The only publication that reports on what is really going on in the country”. At their own initiative, they headed to Sharpeville to a mass protest that the mainstream media did not regard worthy of coverage.
And when Humphrey Tyler produced his report, there were no takers. Even the professedly liberal Rand Daily Mail (RDM) turned him down, Tyler was told that the RDM already had a “factual report from the police” which had begun circulating claims that police had been attacked by a “armed mob”. However, as Berry’s photographs clearly showed, there were no weapons, or even stones, left behind by the fleeing crowd, “only shoes and hats and a few bicycles among the bodies”. Most of the victims were shot in the back.
It took until 2024 with the publication of a book by two American academics, Professor William Worger and Nancy Clark, to set the record straight. They checked the records, and interviewed survivors, producing the first ever investigation of the true toll of the massacre.
The murders at Sharpeville sharpened the will of religious leaders around the world to condemn state-backed terrorism. But that was 66 years ago.
In 1960, the police and the government were desperate not to have such facts surface, but Tyler and Berry, with the aid of a sympathetic lawyer, managed to hide Berry’s film and copies of Typer’s reports. A fortnightly Liberal Party publication also agreed to publish, did so, and was banned by the government. But, by April 2, 12 days after the massacre, the news was out – and much of the world was outraged.
Today, we have much more to be enraged about as hundreds of people are routinely massacred with apparent impunity. This is a time when concepts such a justice and rule of law are flouted by what are in effect the gangster bosses of various hypocrisies that claim to be liberal/peoples’/socialist democracies. Much has obviously changed. But one, vital factor has not: we, the overwhelming majority of humanity who wish only to live in peace, remain the many while those who continue — as they did in the past — to divide, exploit and destroy, are the few.
TERRY BELL (above) is one of South Africa’s most respected political analysts. He gave the editor of this website permission to publish his latest article marking Human Rights Day, March 21st, 2026.