Читать книгу Holding the Fort - Toni Strasburg - Страница 6

After my mother, Hilda Bernstein, died, my sister and I were going through her papers, getting them ready to send to the archive. Among them were her journals. One was a diary she had started writing about the events during the tense days leading up to the State of Emergency that followed the Sharpeville shootings on 21 March 1960. Somehow, she managed to keep it up throughout her time in prison, supplementing it with sketches of prison life and poems that she wrote to amuse the other women or send to the children.

What had started as a peaceful demonstration of about 5 000 people protesting the pass laws outside the police station in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, was turned into a massacre when police fired at the protestors, killing 69 men, women and children and injuring 108. No one had anticipated this brutal outcome.

News of the shootings drew immediate international condemnation, and in the days following Sharpeville, marches and demonstrations took place across South Africa. The ANC and PAC called for a ‘stay-at-home’. The government responded by declaring a State of Emergency, banning all public gatherings, and banning the ANC and PAC, effectively forcing them underground. Thousands of arrests took place during those days, and many people went into exile to evade arrest. My parents were among them.

This is a personal story of one family in the three months that followed.