Honour the sacrifice of Sharpeville

TOMORROW we remember the sacrifice of 69 people – ordinary South Africans – who marched against injustice and paid the ultimate price.

A crowd of 7 000 people marched to the Sharpeville police station to hand in their passbooks, internal passports that rendered them (in the immortal words of Sol Plaatje) pariahs in the land of their birth. Doing this would constitute a crime, but the organisers hoped that doing it en masse across the country would paralyse the apartheid police state to prevent it.

The protest on March 21, 1960 was a peaceful demonstration. The protesters were unarmed. The police panicked and opened fire; 69 protesters were killed, scores injured. What happened at Sharpeville would prove a catalyst for a shift in gear in the struggle for liberation of this country, and in state repression.

There is a direct link that can be neither erased nor forgotten between the events on those dusty streets outside Vereeniging and the democratic liberation of our country on April 27, 1994 – recognised by immortalising this date as Human Rights Day every year.

It is only fitting that we remember how ordinary men and women stood up in the face of an increasingly repressive state that had not just denied them the right to vote, but stripped them of the right to be human. It left them unable to compete equally for jobs, live where they chose, or even fight against arbitrary harassment and detention by the police.

We forget how these people, civilians not soldiers, shook the edifice of one of the most powerful regiments on the continent. We forget their incredible courage, to shake off the shackles of servitude enforced literally by the lash of police batons.

And if we forget their sacrifice, we squander their legacy, because we tarnish the miracle of what we have today, by not appreciating that which we have received.

The lesson of Sharpeville is about human rights. We are all equal. No one’s rights are superior to another’s. We have the right to freedom, to dignity, to fairness; irrespective of our station in society.

Let’s cherish that tomorrow.