ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the visual history of the Sharpeville Massacre, which took place on the 21 March 1960, when police opened fire on a group of approximately 5000 people who had gathered to protest against the pass laws issued by the apartheid regime. The massacre marked a critical moment in South African history – it led to the banning of the opposition movements and this in turn inaugurated the armed struggle. The chapter focuses on how the Commission of Inquiry into the massacre absolved the police of responsibility and on how state-sanctioned erasure of the history of the massacre has continued during the post-apartheid period. Sixty years after Sharpeville, it remains difficult to say exactly what occurred there, to identify people who appear in images of the massacre, living or dead, or to specify exactly how many people were killed by the police. I argue that the resistant potential of photographs made at the time of the massacre has not been exhausted, but that what has been lost cannot be recovered by forensic means, and that ultimately such attempts only bring what remains irreparable more sharply into view. The chapter argues for recognising the relation between Sharpeville and the Marikana Massacre of 2012, and for understanding the significance of how the protests against the pass laws in 1960 brought the country to the brink of a general strike.
