Roots of Outrage. John Davis Gordon
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ANC gang. Unfortunately, he’ll hang. The evidence is strong.’
Unfortunately … He wrote an article that night around that word. Two interpretations were possible: ‘Unfortunately for the accused he will hang’, and ‘It is unfortunate that we have to hang a man who fights the ANC’, which is what the sergeant had in mind. Divide and rule: ‘Let ’em fight each other, the more the better.’ And there was a third interpretation, Mahoney wrote, with which many South Africans would secretly agree, even though they clamoured for the end of apartheid: they were afraid of them, the ANC, and felt secretly sorry for the primitive man who wanted muti to enable him to fight them … But the editor didn’t publish it: ‘Good stuff, Luke,’ he said, ‘but we can’t say it.’
And then came the famous speech in South Africa by Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Great Britain, and then came the gore of Sharpeville, and then came the gore of the prime minister of South Africa.
Harold Macmillan had just been on a whistle-stop tour through his government’s colonies in Africa. He had been impressed by the level of African nationalism and he wanted to tell Her Majesty’s dominion of South Africa a thing or two about their folly of apartheid.
‘The Wind of Change is blowing through this continent,’ he told the South African parliament, ‘… and this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact and our national policies must take account of it …’ The third world of emergent nations, he said, were trying to choose between the models of the first, free, world of the West and the second, communist, world of the East. ‘Choosing by our example.’ Great Britain, he said, was granting independence to its African colonies in the belief that it was the only way to establish a free world, as opposed to a communist world. ‘We try to respect the rights of individuals … merit alone must be the criterion for man’s advancement … We reject racial superiority, we espouse harmony, unity and the individual’s rights … We in Great Britain have different views to you on this…’ History, he prophesied, would make apartheid a thing of the past. Isolationism, he advised them, was out of date in the modern, shrinking world. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee …
‘It was a brilliant, dignified speech,’ George Mahoney wrote to his son, ‘and you must include it verbatim in the journals, but you can imagine that it went over like a lead balloon. The applause was, at best, mutedly polite, except from me: my clapping was thunderous. I’ve been telling them the same thing for years, to no avail. And old Mac’s speech will avail nothing either. I regret to report that old Hendrik Verwoerd made a most clever – and persuasive, goddamn it – impromptu reply. He made a defence of the white man’s rights as a European in the minority on a black continent, and a presentation of apartheid as a policy “not at variance with the new direction in Africa but in the fullest accord with it” – because he’s going to grant independence to the black homelands exactly as Britain is doing in her black colonies! But his speech left out of account the mathematics – the simple fact that these black homelands are incapable of being economically self-supporting, not big enough for the ever-increasing black population – they’ll be simply reservoirs of labour for white South Africa. And, of course, it leaves out of account the economic injustice and indignity of the blacks in the white urban areas. You must put all this in the journals, Luke …’
Mahoney did, with relish. And then, six weeks after Harold Macmillan’s speech, came a new defiance campaign, and the massacre of Sharpeville.
It is questionable how much Harold Macmillan’s speech resulted in the massacre of Sharpeville, for the new defiance campaign by the ANC had been planned for months: it had been set for 31st March. But the rival PAG decided to upstage the ANC and mount their own defiance ten days earlier, to draw new supporters. The campaign was directed against the pass laws that decreed that a black man who wished to look for work in a white area had to have a pass: if he failed to find work within fourteen days, he had to return to his native area. If found without a valid pass, he was jailed. It was the law that put the lie to Prime Minister Verwoerd’s dignified and clever reply to Harold Macmillan’s speech: the police cells were packed each night with pass-offenders, the courts clogged, the prisons overflowing. A cruel system: cruel to make it difficult for a man to find work, cruel to punish him if he failed to find it. And so the ANC had spread the word that on the appointed day all the people must come together in their thousands and burn their passes on huge bonfires and then march en masse to their police stations and demand to be arrested. Thus would they swamp the system and make the law totally unenforceable.
Luke Mahoney was at Sharpeville that day. His editor could have sent him to dozens of other locations, but he chose Sharpeville for Luke, the only white reporter on Drum, because it was a ‘model location’ with a reputation for little violence. But Sharpeville was not quiet on March 21 1960. A noisy mob of five thousand had almost finished burning their passes when he arrived. He threaded his way through, holding up his camera and calling out: ‘Mr Drum, Mr Drum!’ People were chanting and dancing as they tossed their hated passes onto the leaping flames.
Mahoney was the only white man present, but the mob was not hostile, they wanted publicity. Then the last passes burned and the mob began to surge down the road to the police station. Mahoney was swept along in the crush as the people converged on the open ground outside it. He worked his way through the mob to the very front.
The big police compound was surrounded by a high, diamond-mesh fence, topped with barbed wire. In the centre, surrounded by lawn, was the charge office, a single-storey building, behind it were garages, cells and quarters for the black constables. Beyond them the joylessness of the model location stretched on and on. And all along the stout fence surged the chanting, dancing mob, offering themselves up for arrest.
Mahoney’s impression was that the mob was not hostile. Ebullient, he scribbled, cocky, noisy, taunting – but not hostile in the military sense. In fact, from what I overheard, many people were expecting to hear some important announcement from the police about the suspension of the pass laws …
Suddenly out of the police station the constables came running, with rifles, and they formed a line across the lawn facing the mob. The commander strode up to the fence with a loudhailer and bellowed: ‘Please disperse! Go back to your houses! This gathering is illegal!’
The shouts came back: ‘Yes, we are illegal!’ ‘We have no passes!’ We must be arrested, please!’
The rest was confused. The people at the front were being shoved from behind, and the fence was heaving, a sea of excited, laughing, shouting, singing black faces, men, women, children, young and old pressed against it, clamouring to be arrested. Again and again the station commander bellowed over his loudhailer, and the mob yelled back. Then a black sergeant ran up to the fence in panic, shouting: ‘Disperse! They’re going to shoot! Disperse!’ From his position at the corner of the heaving fence Mahoney formed the impression that the vast majority of the people were just enjoying themselves at the expense of the nervous policemen inside the fence, gleeful grins on black faces.
Mahoney did not hear any order to open fire, and the commander subsequently denied ever giving one. All Mahoney remembered was the line of frightened young Afrikaner policemen, rifles at the ready, the massive mob yelling at the heaving fence, the commander yelling, the black sergeant pleading: then the first shocking shot, then the ragged volley, then the pandemonium.
The pandemonium as the mob turned to flee, screaming, shoving, trampling each other underfoot, bodies crashing, and the panicked firing continued cacophonously. Shots cracked out above the screaming chaos. Men, women, children and old people were running, stumbling, lurching, tripping, sprawling, and still the shocking gunfire continued, cracking open the heavens. Mahoney stared, horrified, his face creased up, screaming: ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ And still it continued, the bodies crashing and writhing; then the commander was running amongst his men, bellowing, and the gunfire spluttered out. Then wailing rose up in its place.
Luke Mahoney stared, aghast. On the ground lay sixty-nine dead, a hundred and eighty wounded. He strode furiously from his corner, his camera and notebook on high, his heart full of outrage, and he cried out