Without the media we would probably never have known the real truth about Sharpeville

Today is Human Rights Day. It commemorates the massacre in the township of Sharpeville on Monday, 21 March 1960: a historic event that arguably signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid. 

The background and details of that fateful day are now perhaps more pertinent than ever, given the growing problem of fake news and media distortion and manipulation.

Had it not been for a journalist, Humphrey Tyler, and a photographer, Ian Berry – whose names seldom feature in discussions about Sharpeville – the police version of having defended themselves against an armed and brutal anti-white mob would probably have been accepted as fact.

In any event, it took 12 days — until 2 April — before Tyler’s factual report was published because the professedly liberal Rand Daily Mail rejected it. And there were no other daily newspapers that would consider it.

“The Rand Daily Mail said they had a ‘factual report’ from the police. And, as I wrote later, it was very different from mine,” Humphrey Tyler told me in an interview in 2015. 

As he and Berry decided on how best to ensure that the story and pictures got out, they placed copies of the text and the negatives in the safe of a trusted lawyer.

The only publication willing to publish the report was the Liberal Party-supporting Contact, “South Africa’s non-racial fortnightly newspaper”. 

The 2 April edition sold out quickly but was then banned by the government, which declared a state of emergency and began detaining hundreds of activists.

But the monthly Drum magazine, for whom both Tyler and Berry worked, had the Sharpeville photographs that confirmed Tyler’s report. They rapidly made their way around the world.

Belatedly, the security police also swooped on the offices of Drum to seize any remaining copies of the magazine that had appeared on 21 March.

On that front cover, Drum carried a picture of Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) members and their leader, the academic Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, bearing the banner of the party that was only 11 months old at the time. 

The headline read: “Who are the Africanists?” By the time the police arrived, the larger print run had already been distributed and almost sold out.

At the time, Drum, staffed by the likes of journalists such as Casey Motsisi, Can Themba, E’skia Mphahlele and Nat Nakasa, prided itself on being the only publication that reported on “what was really going on in the country”.

Having signalled in its latest edition that the PAC should be taken seriously, Humphrey Tyler, the assistant editor, called in for tea with Sobukwe on 18 March to check on the planned 21 March protest against the dompas (dumb pass), a form of ID that had to be produced on demand by every black adult.

Sobukwe confirmed that there would be a call to all black adults to hand in their “passes” to police stations on 21 March and to make themselves available for arrest. 

Tyler was concerned that the PAC, having only recently broken away from the African National Congress (ANC), lacked the organisational capacity for such a national protest.

Drum may have overplayed the issue with its front cover and bigger print run. But Sobukwe seemed confident that the dompas was so widely hated that the masses would turn out without their documents or peacefully hand them in at police stations. 

If the pass laws were then not scrapped, a mass strike would follow. Again, Sobukwe stressed, it would be peaceful.

On the Monday morning, peace did reign. Sobukwe presented himself, without a pass to a police station and was duly arrested along with several supporters.

There were hundreds of protesters, not the envisaged thousands. Drum staff, having completed the latest edition, had also left the office where Ian Berry was busy cleaning his photographic equipment.

Aware that the PAC had made inroads into townships such as Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, Tyler borrowed the editor’s car and together with Ian Berry drove to Sharpeville. 

He came across what he later described as something of a carnival atmosphere, despite the heavily armed police and their Saracen armoured cars around the local police station.

In his 1995 memoir, Life in the Time of Sharpeville, he wrote that “people were grinning, cheerful, and nobody seemed afraid… It was like a Sunday outing, except we knew that Major At Spengler, head of the Rand Security Branch, was in the front car and that there were bullets in the Saracen’s guns.”

Tyler and Berry walked freely among a crowd they estimated at perhaps 3,000, “loosely gathered” around the police station and the Saracen armoured cars, “with some kids playing”. 

Nothing seemed likely to happen and they were thinking of leaving when the first shot rang out, followed by what Tyler described as the “toc-toc-toc-toc” of sten gun fire.

He noticed a policeman standing on top of a Saracen, swinging his sten gun from side to side as he fired into the fleeing crowd. Berry was on the ground or kneeling, shooting picture after picture. Finishing both rolls of film, he ran back to Tyler at the car, shouting, “Get out of here before they [the police] get my film”.

The police later claimed that the crowd had been armed with “ferocious weapons” and that these littered the area around the police station after the crowd had fled. 

As Tyler noted — and Berry’s photographs confirmed — what was left behind were “only shoes and hats and a few bicycles among the bodies”.

Other journalists and later inquiries confirmed Humphrey Tyler’s report and the generally accepted official figure is that 69 people died and some 180 were wounded, the overwhelming number shot in the back.

But the fact that a new political formation could rally numbers at such relatively short notice clearly concerned the security establishment and the government. 

An iron fist cracked down, and nowhere more so than in the remote hill country of the Transkei where another new formation had come into being – the Intaba (mountain) movement.

Less than two months after the massacre at Sharpeville, on 6 June 1960, Intaba called a hilltop meeting. The apartheid authorities were also invited to hear and discuss community grievances. 

The details of what happened on that day at Ngquza Hill near the rural centre of Lusikisiki may never be fully known. 

It took nearly 40 years and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to discover that the meeting had been broken up with gunfire and airdropped teargas. At least 11 people died.

There were no journalists present at Ngquza Hill. No photographs. And no need for the authorities to even invent a fictitious scenario.

Humphrey Tyler, who went on to hold several senior editorial posts, died at his home in the Eastern Cape in 2016; Ian Berry became an internationally acclaimed photographer and lives in London. DM