Even casual readers of South African history know—or think they know—about the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960, during which 69 protesters were killed with another 180 wounded, according to the police figures. Voices of Sharpeville turns that narrative upside down by putting “Sharpeville, the community and its history, at the center of this story” (xii). Working from several hundred interviews and statements from claims for compensation and the “Commission of Enquiry…” (1960) as well as oral testimony from interviews with 30 Sharpeville residents (2018, 2019, and 2022), newly accessible archives, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies, Clark and Worger meticulously reconstruct, correct, and corroborate “the motivation for the oppression” rather than centering solely on “the motivation for the protest” (xv). Far more than a correction of numbers—at least 91 killed and 238 wounded, contrary to the often-unquestioned police count—with unassailable evidence, Voices transforms the numbers into individuals, families, and neighbors in Sharpeville: statistical victims become names, faces, and lives of “between 2,500 and 3,000 individuals, people who were [and are] intimately affected in every aspect of their daily lives by the police shooting” (208).
By evoking the history of Sharpeville, the Vaal Triangle and the (predominantly from the fourteenth century) Sotho-Tswana peoples in the first four chapters, Clark and Worger show an ever-tightening exploitation from labor on Boer farms through an increasing demand for cheap labor in mines to the controlled labor in attendant industries and businesses. Earlier discoveries—diamonds in Kimberly (1867), coal deposits along the Vaal River (1880), and gold on the Rand (1886)—facilitated the rise of state-owned industries in Vereeniging (the white center of commerce and industry in the Vaal Triangle where most Sharpeville residents worked) into a massive industrial complex with a huge steel plant and power stations to supply Johannesburg and Pretoria among other towns and cities. Even more crucial for the security of the apartheid state, Vereeniging supplied “water for the entire Rand … 250 million gallons of water per day to Johannesburg and Pretoria” (114). Moreover, Vereeniging had been supplied by labor from Top Location, a township deemed too close to the white center of the area, and itself demolished (1946–59) in favor of the planned, “model township” of Sharpeville that would be a model for the whole of South Africa in controlling the cost of housing for African labor (62). Clark and Worger track this brutal process of removal, more familiar to readers at Sophiatown in Johannesburg and at District Six in Cape Town, in parallel with the cascade of evermore restrictive laws governing those in Sharpeville and the increasing enforcement of the passbook laws. Sharpeville emerges as not only a vibrant community known for its soccer, boxing, and jazz, but also the center of economic security for the apartheid state.
Consequently, Sharpeville’s status shifted from a concern of cheap housing for a growing labor force to one demanding increasing control of Africans in a segregated society. The police in the area had suppressed “riots” (1933,1937,1940) and labor strikes (1944,1946, 1958) and they were aware of Pan African Congress (PAC) political activity in the township—it was the only township with a police station in the middle of it. The middle two chapters of Voices give readers a near hour-by-hour account of the gathering of protesters, perhaps 4,000–5,000 men, women, and children, and the summoning of high-ranking South African police and Security Branch officers. As those protesting the passbook laws that had become daily harassment waited for hours, unarmed, peaceful, patient, and in the hot sun beside a fence around the station, Clark and Worger reconstruct a nearly minute-by-minute sequence of both police and protesters’ movements in the hours before the shooting. The crowd is continually admonished to remain nonviolent—and does—as it waits for a 2 pm speech on passbook laws from the highest-ranking Native Commissioner. At 1:40 pm, a line of seventy police officers opens fire with machine guns and automatic weapons, emptying more than a thousand rounds into the fleeing protesters in 45 seconds. Within 20 minutes, the police had loaded ninety-one bodies into vans to be hauled away. Clearly, in this account, no shots are fired by the protesters, no stones were thrown, and the massacre was a cold-blooded, calculated mass murder meant to serve as a warning to those who would challenge—even nonviolently—the apartheid state.
In the concluding chapters, Voices tracks the aftermath of the victims, often in vivid detail, and the iconic status of Sharpeville as the world-wide symbol of the horrific evidence of apartheid’s brutality. Physical injuries left individuals disabled for life; arrests were rampant; families were evicted (law required an employed male for residence in the household—those murdered left wives and children without shelter); trauma survives to the present. Clark and Worger put faces to the devastating repression and even more severe poverty that followed the loss of loved ones. (Residents could be challenged for a passbook merely going next door to a neighbor’s house.) They also shatter commonly held misconceptions—such as that the protesters were angry, armed, and unemployed when, in fact, unemployment in Sharpeville was only 5 percent for males over eighteen and most of the unemployed were elderly (107). Voices in Sharpeville will likely stand as the definitive, seminal account of Sharpeville and the Sharpeville Massacre for at least the next generation. In doing so, it brings the insane hatred of white supremacy into the glaring light for all to see.
