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Sharpville Massacre

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Kekeletso Mphuthi
Human Rights Day (21 March, the date of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960)
During the Apartheid era in South Africa, black people were oppressed beyond humane standards. They were deprived of racial equality with the whites. Also, they were exploited off from their land. Furthermore, they were restricted from certain privileges. All this caused retaliation by the blacks both politically and socially, and the eventual result was the Sharpeville Massacre.
The Sharpeville massacre was a haunting historical response by black people against the Apartheid oppression. For almost fifty years black South Africans had strived for their struggle against oppression and exploitation with the greatest patience. They had put their …show more content…

Then on March 21, 1960, the people of Sharpeville began to move up Seiso Street toward the police station at the top end of the township. It was said that the Congress leaders wanted everyone to go there and get them arrested for not carrying their passes. People crowded around the high security fence and were chanting and singing. On the other side of the fence were armed policemen lined up and ready to shoot and to the sides of the crowd were two rock-hard cars equipped with machine guns. People arrived in masses with only faith at hand. At exactly 1:50 P.M. there was uproar at the right side of the gate, it seemed as though a fat woman had been bumped by a police car as it tried to drive through the gate. Immediately after this there were chattering noises within the crowd. The police started shooting at crowd. People were being shot in the head. A survivor of this tragic day, Michael Zondo, a school teacher, recalls seeing brains flying everywhere in front of him, skulls bursting wide open. The crowd spread quickly and people began running in a panic. It was a moment of total chaos.
Suddenly it was all over, 69 deaths and 180 sufferers, later the Sharpeville Massacre had come to an end. There is no memorial to the Sharpeville Massacre as there is to the women and children who died in the Boer concentration camps, but it holds the same symbolic place in the pilgrimage of deaths of

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