Sharpeville massacre, 66 years on: Families still wait for justice

Sharpeville, South Africa – Paulina Mathinye was five years old when her father left home for a meeting near the police station in Sharpeville, a township south of Johannesburg.

“I’ll go run to him,” Mathinye recalled thinking. “He will pick me up like daddies always do with their beloved daughters.”

On March 21, 1960, Mathinye’s father joined other men from the community at a gathering protesting apartheid’s pass laws, which required Black South Africans to carry documents restricting where they could live and work.

“There was a meeting here at the old police station, so he accompanies those fathers to the meeting. But then he never came back.”

Police opened fire on the protesters that day in what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre.

Apartheid-era police records put the death toll at 69 and the number of injured at 180. Research published in 2024 using police records found that as many as 91 people may have been killed and 238 injured. The higher figures are also cited by lawyers representing Sharpeville survivors and families.

The massacre became a defining moment in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. March 21 is now commemorated as Human Rights Day, and South Africa’s democratic Constitution was signed in Sharpeville in 1996.

But for the families of those killed and injured, the consequences did not end that day.