ABSTRACT
During the early morning hours of November 22, 1962, Paarl, an agricultural town 60 km northeast of Cape Town, was the site of a violent march. On this occasion some 250 men, armed with axes, pangas and other homemade weapons, marched from the nearby Mbekweni Township to the police station in the town’s centre. In the unfolding events, marchers, alleged to be Poqo members, killed two white civilians, invoking fears of a Mau Mau-like revolt.1 Despite a massive textual archive that developed around this event, which provides the key source for the production of Poqo history (and, thereby a particular strand of liberation history), the perspectives of the protagonists are fundamentally silenced. In their turn histories of the event and the organisation have tended to replicate the frameworks of the state’s archive.
