Julian Kunnie
Cape Town - March 21, 1960 was a watershed historical landmark in the South African/Azanian decolonisation Struggle.
Again, catastrophically, many young people today have little knowledge about the historical significance of Sharpeville and its relevance to the need for continued liberation from neo-colonialism in South Africa, or even to know a few elementary facts.
The ANC government has sought to downplay the relevance and importance of the life-changing event, known as Human Rights Day nationally, when 69 people were killed, shot in cold blood by apartheid police – many in the back – and 180 were wounded, including 50 women and children.
This was the first major national resistance to the imposition of the dreaded passbook, that was required of all apartheid classified “African” people (part of the 10-category racial classification under apartheid) to carry the humiliating document and show it to police as proof of place of origin, residence, etc.
Failure to produce such documents resulted in imprisonment, generally at least six months of hard prison labour.
The PAC, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, headed by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, who was later imprisoned on Robben Island for nine years and subsequently confined to Kimberly where he passed away from lung cancer, was responsible for calling for the protest in Sharpeville, where people openly burnt their passbooks, akin to the slave codes in the US Deep South under the chattel slavery system.
Support from the ANC was not forthcoming since it considered the PAC a rival organisation.
The PAC was formed by the Youth Wing of the ANC that broke away, since it was determined to pursue a more radical confrontational approach to the monstrosity and brutality of apartheid settler-colonialism.
Fast forward to March 21, 2023. The national printed news outlets, as always, have done little to highlight the deep, society-changing, liberation-leaning shift in the political landscape given the historic event of Sharpeville 63 years ago.
Instead, the ruling ANC regime instituted Human Rights Day and the regime and white capitalist-owned and controlled media establishment followed suit.
PAC secretary-general Apa Pooe, speaking to journalists at the Sharpeville commemoration on March 21, as well as other organisations’ representatives and those from the Azanian Peoples’ Organisation (Azapo), a Black Consciousness Movement organisation, stressed to reporters that the event was not a celebration, but was a solemn commemoration in recognition of the martyrs who had sacrificed their lives for the liberation of colonised Azania.
They also emphasised accurately that no substantial or real progress in the South African political economy and society had been made since 1994, because 87% of the land (or about that today) was still owned by a 7.7% white minority; the economy was owned and operated by white capital; education was largely inaccessible for most black people; and the conditions of unemployment and impoverishment for the majority were dire.
It came as no coincidence that a few days ago, the EFF called for a national strike and a shutdown of major sectors of the industrial sector, with the demand for the resignation of Cyril Ramaphosa and the urgent need to address pressing issues of impoverishment, lack of educational access, especially at the tertiary level, unemployment, and very poor public services.
The ANC regime, typical of the responses of its Western capitalist backers, responded with harsh threats and earmarked some R166million for deploying thousands of soldiers at key economic and financial installations, essentially commercial property.
Money is always available for repression of the people! Though peaceful protest is protected under the South African constitution, the government’s response was immediate: reactionary brute force, threats and intimidation, all couched ostensibly to prevent the likes of riots and destruction of lives and property from July 2021 that stemmed from protests against the probable imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma.
At the core of capitalist principle and practice is the sacredness of ruling class-owned property, and law enforcement is generally structured to provide legal and state protection of such.
The property of the oppressed, marginalised, impoverished, and those of the working classes, especially in South Africa and the US, matter little, despite constitutional provisions and protections.
The reason is that the legal system itself, in both contexts particularly, is controlled by the respective ruling classes and by the money and wealth that such classes wield in the shaping of these societies. Hence, most Black and indigenous people in the US and South Africa, Brazil,
Australia, Hawaii, Namibia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Palestine, and in other settler-colonies mostly in the Western hemisphere where capitalism is the dominant ideology, have little or no substantial legal rights or human rights for that matter, because they lack the financial and property resources to engage in legal battles to secure their rights.
Sharpeville, in the final analysis, is a symbol of African revolution for liberation from Western colonialism, capitalism, militarism and inhumanity.
It signifies a rejection of Eurocentric norms, culture, languages, orientation, aspirations, educational values and most importantly, capitalism, that sacralised profits, the accumulation of money and materialistic possessions as the central and primary goal and essence of life, and demands the displacement of such warped and distorted values and the restoration of indigenous cultures and ways of knowing, being and living.
Concretely, what does that mean for South Africa/Azania, the rest of Mother Africa, and the world? It means that the Earth and the rest of the natural world, including us two-legged humans as the indigenous Indians of Turtle Island (occupied North America) teach and live, is sacred and ultimate. Ubuntu, after all, is a similar concept.
If ubuntu was really practised in Africa, there wouldn’t be hundreds of millions of people struggling for food, clean drinking water, sanitation, decent and adequate housing, free education and health care, and the right to land for cultivation, peace and security, especially for the most vulnerable, women and children.
If ubuntu was the law and norm of the day, tens of millions of frustrated youths wouldn’t be begging on the streets for food or a handout, or being forced into criminal activity to earn money to take care of themselves.
Most importantly, under ubuntu and indigenous principles, the Earth and the land would be considered sacred and respected, honoured, protected and preserved, not commodified, raped for profit by real estate, plundered and bled through mining, oil and gas extraction, and polluted along with precious rivers, streams, and lakes, through industrial waste.
Kunnie is a global educator, researcher, author and activist. His forthcoming fifth book is “The Earth Mother and the Collapse of Capitalism in the 21st Century” (2023). This is the first of a two-part series on the Sharpeville massacre.
Cape Times