Sharpeville, 66 Years On: Survivors Still Pursue Justice

On a humid March afternoon in 1960, a crowd gathered outside the old police station in Sharpeville, a township south of Johannesburg. They were there to protest the dreaded pass laws that forced Black South Africans to carry documents limiting where they could live and work. Little did they know that the day would end in a massacre that still haunts the community more than six decades later.

Police, armed with Bren guns, opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators. Official apartheid‑era records listed 69 dead and 180 wounded. Recent research, however, suggests the death toll could be as high as 91, with 238 injured – figures now echoed by lawyers representing survivors.

For the families, the tragedy was not just a statistic. Paulina Mathinye was five when her father marched to the meeting and never returned. She still remembers the hopeful thought, “I’ll run to him, he’ll pick me up like daddies always do.” The promise was broken by a burst of gunfire. Her mother, suddenly a widow, became a domestic worker, often sending her children to bed with empty stomachs.

“Sometimes we went to sleep without any food. Sometimes we came back from school and found nothing to eat,” Mathinye told us. The lack of electricity meant even a single candle was a luxury. Her dream of becoming a teacher slipped away as she slipped into work to keep the household afloat.

Another witness, Ishmael Poho, was six when his father disappeared at the same rally. “He told me to stay home. That was the last time I saw him,” Poho recalled, his words filtered through an interpreter. His mother spent three agonising days searching police stations before finally finding his father’s body stacked in a garage‑turned‑morgue.

Those personal losses fed a collective resolve that never faded. In the weeks following Sharpeville, families tried to bring legal action, only to be blocked by the Indemnity Act of 1961 – a law that granted blanket immunity to the security forces for anything done during the uprising.

Fast‑forward to 2026. Lawyers for Human Rights have lodged a fresh application in the Gauteng High Court, demanding that the Indemnity Act be declared unconstitutional. They also seek certification for a class‑action suit that would allow the surviving victims and the dependants of the dead to claim damages.

Charne Tracey‑Mamdoo, a strategic litigator with the organisation, explained, “Immediately after the massacre, families tried to claim compensation, but the 1961 Act shut the door on them. We are now asking the court to open that door again.”

Over 70 survivors and relatives have expressed interest in the proposed litigation. The lawyers have spent years tracking down the elderly witnesses, piecing together archival material, and gathering expert testimony to prove the Act’s continued injustice.

Time is running out. Many of those directly affected are now in their eighties or nineties, and some have already died without ever seeing any restitution. The case, if certified, could pave the way for individual claims, potentially providing financial redress and, perhaps more importantly, a formal acknowledgment of the wrongs endured.

Sharpeville’s legacy lives on in South Africa’s constitutional DNA – March 21 is celebrated as Human Rights Day, and the 1996 Constitution was signed in the very township where the blood was shed. Yet, for families like Mathinye’s and Poho’s, the constitutional promises feel incomplete without a courtroom that finally holds the perpetrators – or the state that shielded them – accountable.

The fight is as much about money as it is about memory. It is about telling the world that the wounds of apartheid are not merely historical footnotes but living scars that demand justice, even if that justice arrives sixty‑six years later.