by Wilbur Smith
‘There may well be disturbances in the Sharpeville area,’ he conceded. ‘But it is a small township and has always been very peaceful. We can expect our men there to behave well and I do not see any immediate danger. I suggest we send twenty or thirty men to reinforce Sharpeville, and concentrate our main efforts on the larger townships with violent histories of boycotts and strikes.’
‘Very well,’ Manfred agreed at last. ‘But I want you to maintain at least forty per cent of our reinforcements in reserve, so that they can be moved quickly to any area that flares up unexpectedly.’
‘What about arms?’ Danie Leroux asked. ‘I am about to authorize the issue of automatic weapons to all units.’ He turned the statement into a query and Manfred nodded.
‘Ja, we must be ready for the worst. There is a feeling amongst our enemies that we are on the verge of capitulation. Even our own people are becoming frightened and confused.’ His voice dropped, but his tone was fiercer and more determined. ‘We have to change that. We have to crush these people who wish to tear down and destroy all we stand for and give this land over to bloodshed and anarchy.’
The centres of support for the PAC were widely scattered across the land, from the eastern tribal areas of the Ciskei and the Transkei to the southern part of the great industrial triangle along the Vaal River, and a thousand miles south of that in the black township of Langa and Nyanga that housed the greater part of the migrant worker force that serviced the mother city of Cape Town.
In all these areas Sunday 20 March 1960 was a day of feverish effort and planning, and of a peculiar expectancy. It was as though everybody at last believed that this new decade would be one of immense change.
The radicals were filled with a feeling of infinite hope, however irrational, and with a certainty that the Nationalist government was on the verge of collapse. They felt that the world was with them, that the age of colonialism had blown away on the winds of change, and that after a decade of massive political mobilization by the black leaders the time of liberation was at last at hand. All it needed now was one last shove, and the walls of apartheid would crash to earth, crushing under them the evil architect Verwoerd and his builders who had raised them up.
Raleigh Tabaka felt that marvellous euphoria as he and his men moved through the township, going from cottage to cottage with the same message: ‘Tomorrow we will be as one people. No one will go to work. There will be no buses and those who try to walk to the town will be met by the Poqo on the road. The names of all who defy the PAC will be taken and they will be punished. Tomorrow we are going to make the white police fear us.’
They worked all that day, and by evening every person, man and woman, in the township had been warned to stay away from work and to assemble in the open space near the new police station early on the Monday morning.
‘We are going to make the white police fear us. We want everybody to be there. If you do not come, we will find you.’
Amelia had worked as hard and unremittingly as Raleigh had done, but like him she was still fresh, unwearied and excited as they ate a quick and simple meal in the back room of the bakery.
‘Tomorrow we will see the sun of freedom rise,’ Raleigh told her as he wiped his bowl with a crust of bread. ‘But we cannot afford to sleep. There is still much work to do this night.’ Then he took her hand and told her, ‘Our children will be born free, and we will live our life together like men, and not like animals.’ And he led her out into the darkening township to continue the preparations for the great day that lay ahead.
They met in groups on the street corners, all the eager young ones, and Raleigh and Amelia moved amongst them delegating their duties for the morrow, selecting those who would picket the road leading from Sharpeville to Vereeniging.
‘You will let no one pass. Nobody must leave the township,’ Raleigh told them. ‘All the people must be as one when we march on the police station tomorrow morning.’
‘You must tell the people not to fear,’ Raleigh urged them. ‘Tell them that the white police cannot touch them and that there will be a most important speech from the white government concerning the abolition of the pass laws. Tell the people they must be joyful and unafraid and that they must sing the freedom songs that PAC has taught them.’
After midnight Raleigh assembled his most loyal and reliable men, including the two Buffaloes from the shebeen, and they went to the homes of all the black bus drivers and taxi drivers in the township and pulled them from their beds.
‘Nobody will leave Sharpeville tomorrow,’ they told them. ‘But we do not trust you not to obey your white bosses. We will guard you until the march begins. Instead of driving your buses and taxis tomorrow and taking our people away, you will march with them to the police station. We will see to it that you do. Come with us now.’
As the false dawn flushed the eastern sky, Raleigh himself scaled a telephone pole at the boundary fence and cut the wires. When he slid down again he laughed, as he told Amelia, ‘Now our friend the Leopard will not find it so easy to call in other police to help him.’
Captain Lothar De La Rey parked his Land-Rover and left it in a sanitary lane in a patch of shadow out of the street lights and he moved quietly to the corner and stood alone.
He listened to the night. In the years he had served at Sharpeville he had learned to judge the pulse and the mood of the township. He let his feelings and his instincts take over from reason, and almost immediately he was aware of the feral excitement and sense of expectation which had the township in its grip. It was quiet until you listened, as Lothar was listening now. He heard the dogs. They were restless, some close, others at a distance, yapping and barking, and there was an urgency in them. They were seeing and scenting groups and single figures in the shadows. Men hurrying on secret errands.
Then he heard the other sounds, soft as insect sounds in the night. The whistle of lookouts on the watch for his patrols and the recognition signals of the street gangs. In one of the dark cottages nearby a man coughed nervously, unable to sleep, and in another a child whimpered fretfully and was instantly hushed by a woman’s soft voice.
Lothar moved quietly through the shadows, listening and watching. Even without the warning of the pamphlets, he would have known that tonight the township was awake and strung up.
Lothar was not an imaginative or romantic young man, but as he scouted the dark streets he suddenly had a clear mental picture of his ancestors performing this same dire task. He saw them bearded and dressed in drab homespun, armed with the long muzzle-loaders, leaving the security of the laagered wagons, going out alone into the African night to scout for the enemy, the swartgevaar, the black danger. Spying out the bivouac where the black impis lay upon their war shields, waiting for the dawn to rush in upon the wagons. His nerves crawled at those atavistic memories, and he seemed to hear the battle chant of the tribes in the night and the drumming of assegai on rawhide shield, the stamp of bare feet and the crash of war rattles on wrist and ankle as they came in upon the wagons for the dawn attack.
In his imagination the cry of the restless infant in the nearby cottage became the death screams of the little Boer children at Weenen, where the black impis had come sweeping down from the hills to massacre all in the Boer encampment.
He shivered in the night as he realized that though so much had changed, as much had remained the same. The black danger was still there, growing each day stronger and more ominous. He had seen the confident challenging look of the young bucks as they swaggered through the streets and heard the warlike names they had adopted, the Spear of the Nation and the Pure Ones. Tonight, more than ever, he was aware of the danger and he knew where his duty lay.
He went back to the Land-Rover and drove slowly through the streets. Time and again he glimpsed small groups of dark figures, but when he turned the spotlight upon them, they melted away into the night. Everywhere he went he heard the warning whistles out there in the darkness, and his nerves tightened and tingled. When he met hi
s own foot-patrolling constables, they also were nervous and ill at ease.
When the dawn turned the eastern sky pale yellow and dimmed out the street lamps he drove back through the streets. At this time in the morning they should have been filled with hurrying commuters, but now they were empty and silent.
Lothar reached the bus terminus, and it too was almost deserted. Only a few young men in small groups lounged at the railings. There were no buses, and the pickets stared at the police Land-Rover openly and insolently as Lothar drove slowly past.
As he skirted the boundary fence, passing close to the main gates, he exclaimed suddenly and braked the Land-Rover. From one of the telephone poles the cables trailed limply to the earth. Lothar left the vehicle and went to examine the damage. He lifted the loose end of the dangling copper wire, and saw immediately that it had been cut cleanly. He let it drop and walked slowly back to the Land-Rover.
Before he climbed into the driver’s seat, he glanced at his wristwatch. It was ten minutes past five o’clock. Officially he would be off duty at six, but he would not leave his post today. He knew his duty. He knew it would be a long and dangerous day and he steeled himself to meet it.
That Monday morning, 21 March 1960, a thousand miles away in the Cape townships of Langa and Nyanga the crowds began assembling. It was raining. That cold drizzling Cape north-wester blew from the sea, dampening the ardour of the majority, but by 6 a.m. there was a crowd of almost ten thousand gathered outside the Langa bachelor quarters, ready to begin the march on the police station.
The police anticipated them. During the weekend they had been heavily reinforced and all officers and senior warrant officers issued with Sten guns. Now a Saracen armoured car in drab green battle paint entered the head of the wide road in which the crowd had assembled, and a police officer addressed them over the loudspeaker system. He told them that all public meetings had been banned and that a march on the police station would be treated as an attack.
The black leaders came forward and negotiated with the police, and at last agreed to disperse the crowd, but warned that nobody would go to work that day and there would be another mass meeting at 6 p.m. that evening. When the evening meeting began to assemble, the police arrived in Saracen armoured cars, and ordered the crowd to disperse. When they stood their ground, the police baton-charged them. The crowd retaliated by stoning the police and in a mass rushed forward to attack them. The police commander gave the command to fire and the Sten guns buzzed in automatic fire and the crowd fled, leaving two of their number dead upon the field.
From then on weeks of rioting and stoning and marches racked the Cape peninsula, culminating in a massed march of tens of thousands of blacks. This time they reached the police headquarters at Caledon Square, but dispersed quietly after their leaders had been promised an interview with the Minister of Justice. When the leaders arrived for this interview they were arrested on orders of Manfred De La Rey, the Minister of Police, and because police reserves had by this time been stretched almost to breaking point soldiers and sailors of the defence force were rushed in to supplement the local police units and within three days the black townships were cordoned off securely.
In the Cape the struggle was over.
In Van Der Bijl Park ten miles from Vereeniging and in Evaton, both notorious centres of radical and violent black political resistance, the crowds began to gather at first light on Monday 21 March.
By nine o’clock the marchers, thousands strong, set out in procession for their local police stations. However, they did not get very far. Here, as in the Cape, the police had been reinforced and the Saracen armoured cars met them on the road and the loud-hailers boomed out the orders to disperse. The orderly columns of marchers bogged down in the quicksands of uncertainty and ineffectual leadership and the police vehicles moved down on them ponderously, forcing them back, and finally broke up their formations with baton charges.
Then abruptly the sky was filled with a terrible rushing sound and every black face was turned upwards. A flight of Sabre jet fighter aircraft of the South African Air Force flashed overhead, only a hundred feet above the heads of the crowd. They had never seen modern jet fighters in such low-level flight and the sight and the sound of the mighty engines was unnerving. The crowds began to break up, and their leaders lost heart. The demonstrations were over almost before they had begun.
Robert Sobukwe himself marched to Orlando police station in greater Soweto. It was five miles from his house in Mofolo, and although small groups of men joined him along the way, they were less than a hundred strong when they reached the police station and offered themselves for arrest under the pass laws.
In most other centres there were no marches, and no arrests. At Hercules police station in Pretoria six men arrived passless and demanded to be arrested. A jocular police officer obligingly took their names and then sent them home.
In most of the Transvaal it was undramatic and anti-climactic — but then there was Sharpeville.
Raleigh Tabaka had not slept all night, he had not even lain down to rest but had been on his feet exhorting and encouraging and organizing.
Now at six o’clock in the morning he was at the bus depot. The gates were still locked, and in the yard the long ungainly vehicles stood in silent rows while a group of three anxious-looking supervisors waited inside the gates for the drivers to arrive. The buses should have commenced their first run at 4.30 a.m. and by now there was no possibility that they could honour their schedules.
From the direction of the township a single figure jogged down the deserted road and behind the depot gate the bus company supervisors brightened and moved forward to open the gate for him. The man hurrying towards them wore the brown peaked driver’s cap, with the brass insignia of the bus company on the headband.
‘Ha,’ Raleigh said grimly. ‘We have missed one of them,’ and he signalled his men to intercept the black-leg driver.
The driver saw the young men ahead of him and he stopped abruptly.
Raleigh sauntered up to him smiling and asked, ‘Where are you going, my uncle?’
The man did not reply but glanced around him nervously.
‘You were not going to drive your bus, were you?’ Raleigh insisted. ‘You have heard the words of PAC of which all men have taken heed, have you not?’
‘I have children to feed,’ the man muttered sullenly. ‘And I have worked twenty-five years without missing a day.’
Raleigh shook his head sorrowfully. ‘You are a fool, old man. I forgive you for that – you cannot be blamed for the worm in your skull that has devoured your brains. But you are also a traitor to your people. For this I cannot forgive you.’ And he nodded to his young men. They seized the driver and dragged him into the bushes beside the road.
The driver fought back, but they were young and strong and many in number and he went down screaming under the blows and after a while, when he was quiet, they left him lying in the dusty dry grass. Raleigh felt no pity or remorse as he walked away. The man was a traitor, and he should count himself fortunate if he survived his punishment to tell his children of his treachery.
At the bus terminus Raleigh’s pickets assured him that only a few commuters had attempted to defy the boycott, but they had scurried away as soon as they had seen the waiting pickets.
‘Besides,’ one of them told Raleigh, ‘not a single bus has arrived.’
‘You have all begun this day well. Now let us move on to greet the sun of our freedom as it dawns.’
They gathered in the other pickets as they marched, and Amelia was waiting with her children and the other school staff at the corner of the school yard. She saw Raleigh and ran laughing to join him. The children giggled and shrieked with excitement, delighted with this unexpected release from the drudgery of the schoolroom, and they skipped behind Raleigh and his young pickets as they went on.
From each cottage they passed the people swarmed out and when they saw the laughing children, they were infected by the g
aiety and excitement. Amongst them by now there were grey heads, and young mothers with their infants strapped to their backs, older women in aprons leading a child on each hand, and men in the overalls of the steel company or the more formal attire of clerks and messengers and shop assistants, and the black petty civil servants who assisted in the administration of the apartheid laws. Soon the road behind Raleigh and his comrades was a river of humanity.
As they approached the open common ground they saw that there was already a huge concourse of people gathered there, and from every road leading onto the common more came swarming each minute.
‘Five thousand?’ Raleigh asked Amelia, and she squeezed his hand and danced with excitement.
‘More,’ she said. ‘There must be more, ten thousand – even fifteen thousand. Oh, Raleigh, I am so proud and happy. Look at our people – isn’t it a fine sight to see them all here?’ She turned and looked up at him adoringly. ‘And I am so proud of you, Raleigh. Without you these poor people would never realize their misery, would never have the will to do anything to change their lot, but look at them now.’
As Raleigh moved forward the people recognized him and made way for him, and they shouted his name and called him ‘brother’ and ‘comrade’.
At the end of the open common was a pile of old bricks and builders’ rubble and Raleigh made his way towards it, and when he reached it he climbed up on top of it and raised his arms for silence.
‘My people, I bring you the word of Robert Sobukwe who is the father of PAC, and he charges you thus – Remember Moses Gama! Remember all the pain and hardships of your empty lives! Remember the poverty and the oppression!’
A roar went up from them and they raised their clenched fists or gave the thumbs-up sign and they shouted ‘Amandla’ and ‘Gama’. It was some time before Raleigh could speak again, but he told them, ‘We are going to burn our passes.’ He brandished his own booklet as he went on. ‘We are going to make fires and burn the dompas. Then we are going to march as one people to the police station and ask them to arrest us. Then Robert Sobukwe will come to speak for us—’ this was a momentary inspiration of Raleigh’s, and he went on happily, ‘then the police will see that we are men, and they will fear us. Never again will they force us to show the dompas, and we will be free men as our ancestors were free men before the white man came to this land.’ He almost believed it as he said it. It all seemed so logical and simple.