Sharpeville Massacre: residents still claim higher death toll than official records

SHARPEVILLE residents still maintain that the death toll in the March 21, 1960, massacre is much higher than the 69 people in official records.

George Molibedi was only 12 when apartheid security forces fired on a crowd of people protesting against unjust laws forcing Africans to carry a dompas.

Now in his 70s, Molibedi looks at his grandfather Zackia Lefakane’s grave lined among some of the victims laid to rest in a line of modest tombstones at the township’s Pelindaba Cemetery.

Molibedi looks at the grave of Lefakane, who he described as his mother’s nephew, and notes his age at the time of his death.

”He died very young at 50,” he said.

As if to deflect the attention his grandfather is getting, Molibedi quickly lifts his head to other graves across to other graves he insists were also shot on March 21 but died later.

One such grave, with a handwritten headstone, is of an elderly man born in November 1878 and died in October 1960, a few weeks shy of his 82nd birthday.

According to Molibedi, Stephen Poonyane, who he described as an old man, was the first victim of the shooting but is not recorded on the official list.

”The day they were shot, I think I was 12 years old and doing Standard Two (Grade 4),” he said.

Molibedi counted about five graves, including the 82-year-old’s, which he said were also shot on March 21 but died in the following months.

”Those were the guys who were gunned down during the Sharpeville shooting,” he said.

The graves identified by Molibedi are not recognised as part of the victims of the Sharpeville Massacre.

Other relatives of the victims backed Molibedi’s assertions, even adding that there may have been some form of cover-up by the apartheid rulers at the time.

”In some cases, more than one person was buried in a grave,” one man claimed.

Another man maintained that 13-year-old Maria Molebetsi, buried among some of the 69, was not the youngest victim of the massacre as there was a 12-year-old lying at another part of the cemetery that is not very well maintained.

At the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the massacre on Friday, former Emfuleni mayor Reverend Gift Moerane promised the victims’ families that when they return to the cemetery next year, their loved ones’ graves will be in a much better state.

Moerane said the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), after declaring the graves of the Sharpeville Massacre victims a world heritage site, would not find them in their current state.

”You will not find them like this. You will find graves worth their sacrifices,” the clergyman undertook.

The National Heritage Council (NHC) also confirmed the status of the UNESCO World Heritage Site at the gathering.

Despite the promises of interventions in service delivery in the afterlife nearly seven decades after they were killed, the state of the victims’ resting place and their surroundings were a sore sight for some of the relatives as well as Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi.

One grandson of a victim said Emfuleni Local Municipality only cleaned the cemetery in the days leading up to the commemoration.

”When I came here earlier this week, they were still painting the graves and clearing the overgrown grass and thorn bush trees,” the man complained.

Lesufi told Sedibeng District Municipality mayor Lerato Maloka that “our people’s graves must be taken care of and be respected”.

He said he was giving the task to Maloka and the NHC now that the Sharpeville Massacre has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lesufi also expressed his unhappiness about the state of the dirty streets with potholes in Sharpeville.

”We don’t want to see the area in this state when we come back next year,” he said.

loyiso.sidimba@inl.co.za