MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · March 21 · 1960
ON THIS DAY · 21 MARCH 1960
Sharpeville
21 Mar 1960 — South African police fire on a crowd protesting the pass laws, killing 69, most shot in the back. The ANC and PAC are banned and turn to armed struggle; the world can no longer quite look away. Remember them.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Now the map is red but for one charcoal country at the tip — the last and hardest case. South Africa had been under white-minority rule since 1910, but from 1948 the National Party built something more total: apartheid, a legal machine of racial separation that stripped the Black majority of citizenship, land, movement and vote, herding people into “homelands” and townships and reserving the country for a white fifth of the population. (Its architecture deserves — and will get — an atlas of its own; here it is the wall the whole liberation struggle finally reaches.) The resistance is a memorial in itself: the pass-law protest gunned down at Sharpeville in 1960 (69 dead, most shot in the back), after which the banned ANC turned to armed struggle and Mandela went to prison for 27 years; the schoolchildren shot at Soweto in 1976; Steve Biko, killed in police custody in 1977. Each is a wound on this map, not a milestone to be scored.
From Chapter 10 — Apartheid’s Long Fall of The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994 (MAR 1990).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The architecture of apartheid — and why recap it here. From 1948 the National Party legislated total racial separation: the population classified by race, mixed marriage banned, land reserved (87% for…
- The turn — Mandela walks free, 11 February 1990. After twenty-seven years, Nelson Mandela leaves prison on foot, and a struggle that had run through massacre, exile and armed resistance enters its…
- What it changed — From resistance to transition. Unbanning the ANC and freeing Mandela converted a liberation struggle into a negotiation between a state and a movement, each able to destroy the…
Then ask the room: After decades of surviving protest, sanctions and armed struggle, why did the apartheid state finally choose to negotiate itself out of power around 1990? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT
THE DISPATCH
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