THE yearly Human Rights Day public holiday in South Africa in late March commemorates the Sharpeville Massacre, when police opened fire on a crowd of unarmed black protesters outside the Sharpeville police station on 21 March 1960. An estimated 69 people were killed and 180 injured, many shot in the back as they fled the scene.
The protest, led by the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, was against the hated identification document, known as a “dompas” (dumb pass), that the apartheid regime forced black people to carry, and which controlled their movements.
After the first democratic elections of 1994, President Mandela proclaimed 21 March a public holiday as a way of remembering the egregious human rights abuses of apartheid symbolised by the 1960 massacre.
He made another significant symbolic gesture: he selected Sharpeville, about 70km to the south of Johannesburg, as the site where he signed the country’s
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