How to honour those slaughtered at Sharpeville

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba seems to have inherited the political tendency to shoot himself in the foot from his former masters at the Democratic Alliance (DA).

Eager to get in on the Human Rights Day act yesterday, Mashaba posted on X that the 69 victims of the Sharpeville Massacre had “passed away”. Whisked up to heaven on clouds as opposed to writhed in agony from a brutal .303 bullet wound?

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It cannot have been unintentional, so Mashaba may have been trying not to offend potential white voters. Which is a pity, because South Africa will never get anywhere unless we – and that is mainly the white community, who benefitted from apartheid – do not face up to the horrors that system wrought.

Like it or not, its effects remain today, in racially skewed wealth and poverty, as well as ongoing inequality via apartheid’s system of race-based spatial planning.

At the same time, though, the ANC needs to stop cynically using the past (and Sharpeville wasn’t even their protest, it was organised by the PAC) to divert attention from the present-day failures.

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Learn from the past. Make changes and, if necessary, reparations. And avoid at all costs repeating it. That’s how we honour those slaughtered at Sharpeville.