ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 takes up the story of 21 March 1960 at around 11:30 am that day and continues the narrative through the police firing directly at the Sharpeville crowd two hours later. As with Chapter 5, this account tells the story using eyewitness testimonies recorded under oath within days, weeks, and months of the massacre, and interviews undertaken by the authors with survivors during 2018, 2019, and 2022. Unlike previous writings about Sharpeville, this chapter’s focus is on the people involved and not simply the event, on what they said and did, with names and families and occupations instead of what was captured in photographs afterwards, anonymous bodies lying dead in the streets.
