Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

To students of South African history and politics, the significance of Sharpeville, March 21, 1960, still resonates. We knew that the apartheid system was cruel. But the massacre at Sharpeville, at the time a "model" township in the industrial Vaal triangle south of Johannesburg, stunned all South Africans and was used to galvanize the international community against the increasingly embattled regime in Pretoria. Philip Frankel calls it "the century's defining event . . . an occurrence after whose appearance on the historic landscape of South Africa nothing is quite what it had been" (p. 3). Yet surprisingly little comprehensive scholarly work has been done about that fateful day and its aftermath. Bishop R. Ambrose Reeves's little book, Shooting at Sharpeville: The Agony of South Africa (1960) has stood the test of time, but it is not an academic effort, and a good deal of information and data have come to light since its publication. Even the report of the Wessels Commission of Inquiry was never fully published, and the authorities destroyed a mass of documents, some fairly recently. Extraordinarily little is known about the massacre's forensics.

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Frankel sets out to dissect and analyze the explosive moment that no one wanted. This has not been easy, for there is an almost impenetrable mythology about Sharpeville that challenges objectivity. Both the political Left and the Right have exploited their versions of the myth. The resistance version portrays the massacre as a premeditated attempt by the racist state to punish and intimidate its opponents. The apartheid version maintains that a bloodthirsty mob clearly intended to slaughter the vulnerable police and that the police merely exercised their right of self-defense. Between these two poles is the "massacre as a mistake" theory, a consequence of terror and error. Frankel finds none of these explanations satisfactory.

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