Sunday, March 29, 2015

The petrol price will increase by R1.62 a litre from Wednesday, the energy department said.


The price on 95 octane petrol would increase by R1.62 in Gauteng and R1.60 on the coast, according to a statement on Friday.

In Gauteng the price per litre of 93 octane petrol would increase by R1.56 and on the coast by R1.54.

The price per litre of diesel would increase by between R1.20, on the coast, and R1.24, in Gauteng.

The price of illuminating paraffin would increase by 26c per litre countrywide.

Liquefied Petroleum Gas would increase by 85c per kilogram countrywide.

Reasons given for the increase were higher international prices for petrol, diesel, and paraffin, and the weakening of the rand against the US dollar.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Taken from ReunionBlackFamily.com - Adolf Hitler Killed Six Million Jews And Is Worst Human.Cecil Rhodes Founder Of De Beer Diamonds Killed Hundrend Of Million Africans They Made Him Hero.

"The young Black who comes out of college or the university is as ignorant and unlearned as the white laborer. For all practical purposes he is worse off than when he went in, for he has learned only the attitudes and ways of the snake and a few well-worded lies." George Jackson 

Adolf Hitler Killed six million jews and is the worst human being .Cecil Rhodes the founder of the De Beer Diamonds in South Africa killed Hundrend of Million Africans. Leopard of Begium and Cecil Rhodes killed Africans hundrends times than the so call the Jews holocaust, this topic is about Cecil Rhodes.


Every black child in grade school is taught Adolf Hitler Killed six million jews and is the worst human being that ever lived .on the other hand our children's are taught " The right honorable" Cecil Rhodes the founder of of the De Beer Diamonds company in South Africa who killed ten times that number of Africans is a hero and a statesman and if they study hard and do well at European brainwashed schools they may be eligible to win Rhodes Scholarship awards the olderst and most celebrated international fellowship award in the world . They don't mention the scholarships are paid for with the BLOOD of their Ancestors.

A massive psychological conditioning program scenario is precisely what is being done to Black people by the controlling white elites.This miseducation upon the Black psyche is designed to corrupt Blacks’ sense of racial unity and cohesion, mold the character of self-hatred.

 

The invaders also find it. necessary to implement a scheme to divide the oppressed, to prevent them from ever unifying against their invader 

Names: Rhodes, Cecil John 

Born: 5 July 1853, England

Died: 26 March 1902, Muizenberg, Cape Colony


In summary: South African , proponent of British imperialism, and businessman after whom Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was named . Cecil John Rhodes was born on 5 July 1853 in England. He was the fifth son of Francis William Rhodes and his second wife, Louisa Peacock. A priest of the Church of England, his father served as curate of Brentwood Essex for fifteen years, until 1849, when he became the vicar of Bishops Stortford, where he remained until 1876. Rhodes had nine brothers and two sisters and attended the grammar school at Bishops Stortford. He fell ill shortly after leaving school and, as his lungs were affected, it was decided that he should visit his brother who had recently immigrated to Natal. He arrived in Durban on 1 September 1870. He brought three thousands pounds his aunt had lent him and used it to invest in diamond diggings in Kimberley. 

Cecil Rhodes And De Beers: Genocide Diamonds.Cecil Rhodes: A Bad Man in Africa.

The evil that men do lives after them – and rarely more miserably than in the case of Cecil Rhodes, who died 100 years ago this month.

By Matthew Sweet

North of the Zambezi, they have long known about the suppression of free speech, about the bloody redistribution of land along racial lines, about politicians happy to employ armed – and sometimes uniformed – mobs to kill their opponents. They are practices imported to this region, along with the railways, by the British.


Unlike the African press, the Western media rarely invoke the name of Cecil John Rhodes: nearly a century after his death – on 26 March 1902 – his name is more associated with Oxford Scholarships than with murder. It’s easier to focus on the region’s more recent, less Anglo white supremacists: Ian Smith, for instance, who – despite his Scottish background – seems cut from the same stuff as those Afrikaner politicians who nurtured and maintained apartheid farther south.

But it was Rhodes who originated the racist “land grabs” to which Zimbabwe’s current miseries can ultimately be traced. It was Rhodes, too, who in 1887 told the House of Assembly in Cape Town that “the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa”. In less oratorical moments, he put it even more bluntly: “I prefer land to niggers.”


For much of the century since his death, Rhodes has been revered as a national hero. Today, however, he is closer to a national embarrassment, about whom the less said the better. Yet there are plenty of memorials to him to be found. In Bishop’s Stortford, his Hertfordshire birthplace, St Michael’s Church displays a plaque. The town has a Rhodes arts centre, a Rhodes junior theatre group, and a small Rhodes Museum – currently closed – which houses a collection of African art objects. In Oxford, his statue adorns Oriel College, while Rhodes House, in which the Rhodes Trust is based, is packed with memorabilia. Even Kensington Gardens boasts a statue – of a naked man on horseback – based on the central feature of his memorial in Cape Town.


But his presence is more strongly felt – and resented – in the territories that once bore his name. Delegates at the Pan Africanist Congress in January argued that “the problems which were being blamed on [President Robert] Mugabe were created by British colonialism, whose agent Cecil Rhodes used armed force to acquire land for settlers”. He is the reason why, during the campaign for the presidential election in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF described its enemies – white or black – as “colonialists”; why, when Zimbabwe gained full independence in 1980, Rhodes’s name was wiped from the world’s maps.


The prosecution case is strong. Rhodes connived his way to wealth in a lawless frontier culture, then used that fortune to fund a private invasion of East Africa. He bought newspapers in order to shape and control public opinion. He brokered secret deals, issued bribes and used gangs of mercenaries to butcher his opponents, seizing close to a million square miles of territory from its inhabitants. Although he did this in the name of the British Empire, he was regarded with some suspicion in his home country, and when it suited him to work against Britain’s imperial interests – by slipping £10,000 to Parnell’s Irish nationalists, for example – he did so without scruple.


Rhodes was born in the summer of 1853, the fifth son of a parson who prided himself on never having preached a sermon longer than 10 minutes. A sickly, asthmatic teenager, he was sent to the improving climate of his brother’s cotton plantation in Natal. The pair soon became involved in the rush to exploit South Africa’s diamond and gold deposits – and unlike many prospectors and speculators who wandered, dazed and luckless, around the continent, their claim proved fruitful.


When Rhodes began his studies at Oriel College, he returned to South Africa each vacation to attend to his mining interests – which, by his mid-thirties, had made him, in today’s terms, a billionaire. By 1891, he had amalgamated the De Beers mines under his control, giving him dominion over 90 per cent of the world’s diamond output. He had also secured two other important positions; Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony, and president of the British South Africa Company, an organisation that was formed – in the manner of the old East India companies – to pursue expansionist adventures for which sponsoring governments did not have the stomach or the cash. The result of his endeavours produced new British annexations: Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).


Rhodes imprinted his personality on the region with monarchical energy: dams, railway engines, towns and anti-dandruff tonics were all named after him. But his expansionist zeal was not always matched at home in Britain. “Our burden is too great,” Gladstone once grumbled. “We have too much, Mr Rhodes, to do. Apart from increasing our obligations in every part of the world, what advantage do you see to the English race in the acquisition of new territory?” Rhodes replied: “Great Britain is a very small island. Great Britain’s position depends on her trade, and if we do not open up the dependencies of the world which are at present devoted to barbarism, we shall shut out the world’s trade. It must be brought home to you that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, not England. That is why you must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.”


At around the same time, Henry John Heinz was outlining a comparable manifesto: “Our field,” he pronounced, “is the world.” By 1900, his 57 varieties were available in every continent. Global capitalism and imperial expansion developed in collaboration; shared aims, aspirations, patterns of influence. Today, most of the world’s political empires have been dissolved and discredited, but the routes along which capital moves remain the same. After Rhodes came NestlĂ©, Coca-Cola, BP, McDonald’s, Microsoft.


In 1896, Rhodes’s name was linked with the Jameson Raid – a disastrous (and illegal) attempt to annex Transvaal territory held by the Boers, and a principal cause of the South African War of 1899-1902. His reputation in Britain accrued a lasting tarnish. A defence of his character, published in 1897 and co-authored by the pseudonymous “Imperialist”, offers an insight into the charges against him: “Bribery and corruption”, “neglect of duty”, “harshness to the natives” and the allegation that “that Mr Rhodes is utterly unscrupulous”. His lifelong companion Dr Leander Starr Jameson – a future premier of the Cape Colony and the leader of the ill-fated raid – added a postscript insisting that some of Rhodes’s best blacks were friends: “His favourite Sunday pastime was to go into the De Beers native compound, where he had built them a fine swimming bath, and throw in shillings for the natives to dive for. He knew enough of their languages to talk to them freely, and they looked up to him – indeed, fairly worshipped the great white man.”


Did anyone buy this stuff? After Rhodes’s fatal heart attack on 26 March 1902, the death notices were ambivalent. News editors across the world cleared their pages for obituaries and reports of public grief in South Africa, but few wholehearted endorsements of his career emanated from London. “He has done more than any single contemporary to place before the imagination of his countrymen a clear conception of the Imperial destinies of our race,” conceded The Times, “[but] we wish we could forget the other matters associated with his name.” Empire-builders such as Rhodes, the paper said, attracted as much opprobrium as praise: “On the one hand they are enthusiastically admired, on the other they are stones of stumbling, they provoke a degree of repugnance, sometimes of hatred, in exact proportion to the size of their achievements.” Jameson and “Imperialist”, it seems, had not succeeded in rehabilitating their mentor.


But the story of Rhodes’s posthumous reputation is just as complex and contentious as that of his life and career. And curiously, his sexuality was one of the main battlegrounds. In 1911, Rhodes’s former private secretary Philip Jourdan wrote a biography of his late employer in order to counter “the most unjust libels with reference to his private life [which] were being disseminated throughout the length and breadth of the country”. Despite the aggressive romantic attentions of a Polish adventuress and forger named Princess Catherine Radziwill, Rhodes was indifferent to women and gained a reputation for misogyny. His most intense relationships were with men – his private secretary Neville Pickering, who died in his arms; Jameson, whom he met at the diamond mines in Kimberley where, the doctor recalled, “we shared a quiet little bachelor establishment”; and Johnny Grimmer, of whom Jourdan (defeating the purpose of his memoir) said: “He liked Johnny to be near him… The two had many little quarrels. On one occasion for a couple of days they hardly exchanged a word. They were not unlike two schoolboys.”


Rhodes’s excuse for remaining single was the one used today by members of boy bands: “I know everybody asks why I do not marry. I cannot get married. I have too much work on my hands.” Instead, he accumulated a shifting entourage of young men, known as “Rhodes’s lambs”. It’s probable that these relationships were more homosocial than homosexual, but that didn’t stop the gossips or biographical theoreticians. In 1946, Stuart Collete suggested Rhodes was “one of those who, passing beyond the ordinary heterosexuality of the common man, that the French call l’homme moyen sensual, was beyond bisexuality, beyond homosexuality and was literally asexual – beyond sex. It appears to have had no literal meaning to him except as a human weakness that he understood he could exploit in others”. The same biographer wove these comments into an analysis of Rhodes’s appeal to another set of posthumous acolytes: the Nazis.


As the 20th century moved on, Rhodes’s memory became increasingly attractive to extreme (and eventually moderate) right-wing opinion. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (191hailed him as “the first precursor of a Western type of Caesar – in our Germanic world, the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again – there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes”.


It’s easy to see why Spengler, and later Hitler, were fans. Asked by Jameson how long he would endure in memory, Rhodes replied: “I give myself four thousand years.” To the journalist WT Stead he said: “I would annex the planets, if I could. I often think of that.” When, in 1877, he first made his will, he urged his executors to use his fortune to establish a secret society that would aim to redden every area of the planet. He envisioned a world in which British settlers would occupy Africa, the Middle East, South America, the Pacific and Malay islands, China and Japan, before restoring America to colonial rule and founding an imperial world government. “He was deeply impressed,” Jameson recalled, “with a belief in the ultimate destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. He dwelt repeatedly on the fact that their great want was new territory fit for the overflow population to settle in permanently, and thus provide markets for the wares of the old country – the workshop of the world.” It was a dream of mercantile Lebensraum for the English: an empire of entrepreneurs, occupying African territories in order to fill them with Sheffield cutlery, Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup and Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls.


But it was Rhodes’s Alma Mater that did most to brighten his prestige. In 1899, Oxford University, an institution with a long and continuing history of accepting money from morally dubious millionaires, agreed to administer a more cuddly and less clandestine version of the “Imperial Carbonari” of the 1877 will: the Rhodes Scholars. In 1903, the first names were selected. A group of men fitted for “manly outdoor sports”, who would display “qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for the protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship” – men such asBill Clinton, the CIA director Stansfield Turner, the first Secretary General of the Commonwealth Sir Arnold Smith, and the Nato Supreme Commander Bernard Rogers.


By 1936, ML Andrews was praising Rhodes’s “vision of world peace, to be brought about by the domination of the English-speaking nations”. In the same year the Gaumont-British film company produced the hagiographic movie, Rhodes of Africa. Two years later, the little Rhodes Museum was founded in Bishop’s Stortford. When it reopens next year, children will, for a fiver, be able to sign up as one of “Rhodes’s Little Rhinos”.


A 1956 children’s book, Peter Gibbs’s The True Book About Cecil Rhodes – one of a series that also profiled Marie Curie, Captain Scott and Joan of Arc – is the best example of how, in the mid-20th century, Rhodes was reclaimed as a national hero. More unalloyed in its enthusiasm for Rhodes than any comparable 19th-century text, it makes for queasy reading. Especially, perhaps, if you were voting in Zimbabwe last weekend. Southern Rhodesia, it reports, is now “tamed and civilised and cultivated, and many thousands of white people have settled there, and made it their home. Today there are beautiful modern towns; homes, gardens, parks, towering blocks of offices and flats; factories, railways and airports. It is a new and thriving country of the British Commonwealth, where but recently only savages and wild animals dwelt. And it started from the dreams of one young Englishman – Cecil Rhodes”.


They had hoped to start a ‘new Rand' from the ancient gold mines of the Mashona, but the gold had been worked out of the ground long before. The White settlers who accompanied the British South Africa Company to Mashonaland became farmers. When the Matabele and the Mashona rebelled against the coming of the White settlers to their land, the British South Africa Company police crushed them. The conquered lands were named Southern and Northern Rhodesia, to honour Rhodes. Today, these are the countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

He died at Muizenberg on March 26 in 1902.

All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds


Africa and all its resources are the birthright of African people everywhere All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has forced us to recognize the terrible price paid by peoples around the world the oil reserves necessary for the daily functioning of the U.S. economic life. The slogan is “No blood for oil.”


In the Niger Delta of Nigeria African people living in dire poverty are fighting shell Oil for control over the multi-dollar oil industry on their own land. 70 percent on less than a dollar a day. The poverty, lack of electricity and sanitation and profound pollution. Yet Shell Oil and other oil corporations have made more than $300 billion on Nigerian oil. White people live in mansions with big SUVs in the same area. The people of this area are waging armed struggle. They say if they cannot benefit from the oil, no one will benefit from the oil. They call it “blood oil.”


The U.S. and European controlled chocolate industry in Africa is a bitter reality. Ivory Coast produces 40 percent of the world’s cocoa and in West Africa there are more than a quarter million young African children working in enslavement in the cocoa plantations. All chocolate is blood chocolate.

We can even show that even aluminum foil can be called Blood aluminum . In Guinea Conakry earlier this year there was a general strike for over a month. Guinea has 40 percent of the world’s bauxite, the mineral needed to make aluminum, but the average income of those considered “middle class” is $500 a year. Alcoa, Reynolds and other corporations are making billions of dollars but the people are forced to live under a repressive government and cannot even afford to buy rice in a country where gas costs almost $5 a liter.

In Congo 5 million people have been killed in the past few years in U.S. and imperialist backed wars over Coltan the mineral that is the electrical conductor necessary for cell phones and computers. 80 percent of the world’s coltan is in Congo. So we say all computers and cell phones are blood computers and cell phones. Coltan worth over $400 a pound in a world where 1.7 billion people have wireless phones–one out of every 4 on the planet. Child labor, murder, dire poverty–a few dollars a day at best–rape, death in the mines–thousands die in the mine shafts and also from starvation–mostly children.

Blood cell phones and computers

We don’t have to go to Africa or other places. The U.S. is built on African enslaved labor. IIn the U.S. a multitude o products such as office furniture, jeans, clothing, bedding, clocks and signs are made by slave labor inside of prisons. The prison industry has half a million workers more than any Fortune 500 corporation. With more than 2 million mostly African and Mexican people incarcerated With more than 2 million mostly African and Mexican people incarcerated inside the U.S. facing Three Strikes and mandatory minimums, one in three African men between the ages of 20 and 29 is either in jail, on probation or parole. In a private Texas prison guards were videotaped beating, shocking, kicking and setting dogs on prisoners—what u.S. soldiers did in Abu Ghraib has been practiced against African people in U.S. prisons for years. So we can say all prison products are blood products.

In a system built on centuries of the enslavement of African people, on genocide, oppression and colonialism in this country and around the world we can say that beneath the sparkling veneer of every resource that we take for granted is a very ugly story.


So this is the context that we say that All diamonds are blood diamonds!

We are sold the idea that diamonds are a symbol of beauty and long-lasting love. “Diamonds are forever,” “a girl’s best friend.”

The truth about diamonds is not beautiful—diamonds are steeped genocide, colonialism, poverty and oppression–controlled by the brutal DeBeers diamond cartel.

In 1938 DeBeers cartel hired a Philadelphia public relations firm when sales were sagging– to market to Americans that diamond rings were a necessity for engagements and weddings. In the past diamonds were relatively rare as engagement rings. To do this they launched slogan “A diamond is forever,” and promoted the myth that a diamond ring should cost two months salary.


The reality is diamonds are not particularly valuable. They can be found around the world. Their value is created by manufactured scarcity—forcibly keeping diamonds off the market to increase their value. Unlike most other precious stones they do no appreciate with age and have a poor resale value.

Finest large gem-quality diamonds come from Sierra Leone, along with Angola, Namibia and Congo.

Diamonds are not just for jewelry–it is the strongest material in the world.Used in cutting, in airplanes and in defense–ESSENTIAL to the U.S. military industry. Industrial diamonds worth $10,000 a pound.

DeBeers is a cartel which is a monopoly that controls every aspect of the economy of the product. DeBeers controls not only mining but cutting, polishing, setting into jewelry, pricing and selling world wide. Millions of children and very young people involved in diamond industry.

The concept of blood or conflict diamonds came about in reference to the brutal imperialist backed wars in Sierra Leone and West Africa in the 1990s.

Utlwile.  

Sierra Leone is a former British colony on the West Coast of Africa.

British colonialism In the 1700s Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River was called the “slave factory.” From here the British supplied captive Africans particularly to Charlestown South Carolina and to Georgia. Americans. The North American slave ships that called at Bunce Island were sailing out of Newport (Rhode Island), New London (Connecticut), Salem (Massachusetts), and New York.

More than 50,000 Africans were kidnapped from Sierra Leone mostly into South Carolina and Georgia. They were called the Gullah people–worked in rice paddies in cotton plantations in the U.S. They were fierce fighters and many escaped from enslavement by joining the Seminoles in Florida where they built thatched roof houses as in their homeland. Thatched roof–environmentally sustainable!

Sierra Leone won nominal independence from Britain in 1961 with the establishment of neocolonialism as in the rest of Africa.


Sierra Leone is one of the most impoverished countries in the world–most of the people live on less than a dollar a day. It has the highest infant mortality in the world and the life expectancy for men is 38 years.

Yet Sierra Leone has immense natural resources Diamonds-some of the best in the world Titanium ore (red)– ・ in the aerospace industry – for example in aircraft engines and air frames; ・ for replacement hip joints; ・ for pipes, etc, in the nuclear, oil and chemical industries where corrosion is likely to occur. Bauxite used for aluminum Gold Chromite (green) used in stainless steel.

Chromite–stainless steel. As in the rest of Africa the profits and benefits of Sierra Leone’s natural resources are in Europe and North America. Although the resources are on their land, the people are deeply impoverished. 80 percent of households in Sierra Leone must use charcoal and wood for cooking. . In the world 2.4 billion people still cook over wood , charcoal or dung fires.

Neocolonialism. Former British colonizers continue to control the economy, the military and the governing of Sierra Leone — neocolonialism leaving only crumbs. Along with other imperialist states they continue to extract the wealth.


In the 1990s The Revolutionary United Front emerged led by Foday Sankoh. At first the people thought they were fighting in the interest of the people. But they were imperialist influenced fighting for crumbs of the colonial plunder. They launched a brutal war against the people of Sierra Leone with 50,000 murdered and tens of thousands of mutilations. It is said that DeBeers and Israel were the biggest benefactors of the war.


By cutting off the people’s hands-signature torture used by the Belgian colonizers against African people in Congo during Belgian colonialism.

The RUF forced young children to fight and to carry out most of the atrocities–often against other children The child soldiers given tea, coffee and stimulant drugs.

RUF took over some of the diamond mines–this is a picture of one — and began selling diamonds on the open market outside of the control of DeBeers.


From DeBeers website Because this served to depress DeBeers artificially high prices for diamonds based on manufactured scarcity, the DeBeers cartel was threatened. This prompted DeBeers to come up with the concept of the “blood” or “conflict” diamond–not because of concern for the people but because they did not want to see the price of diamonds go down.

So DeBeers diamond cartel set up the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme–that would supposedly determine if a diamond is “blood” or clean. Police policing themselves–like Alberto Gonzalez policing himself.


The reality is DeBeers is the key figure behind the issue of blood diamonds. Under the “legitimate” diamond mines of Sierra Leone–meaning the DeBeers and imperialist controlled mines–African miners are forced to work for almost nothing. Most of the diggers must work “independently getting only a tiny percentage on any diamonds that they find which are taken by the mine. Only a few workers actually get a salary–from 30 cents to $2 a day. Nicky Oppenheimer and CEOs of DeBeers–one world’s richest men worth 3 billion dollars–eats organic foods and farm.


According to an international trade union report 72 percent of the children of Sierra Leone between the ages of 5 to 14 are forced into paid or unpaid labor–in the legitimate diamonds mines or other industry. In that region nearly a half million children are forced into labor. Childhood is a result of privilege.

There is no electrical grid. Only oil lanterns at night. Only electricity is from generators and 82% of that is in Freetown. In sierra Leone only 1% use generators and 85 percent use oil lamps.

Sierra Leone has no running water, no water purification system, little hygiene or few toilets.

Sierra Leone has no system of roads, few paved roads and most roads are impassable in rainy season.


How things got the way they are

Africa is the birthplace of civilization–all science, mathematics, art, philosophy, religion and archeology originated in Africa. Sierra Leone and most of West Africa was part of the African civilization of Mali (the people called it Manden) from 1235 to 1645 — ended by the enslavement of African people. It had enormous influence in the whole world. One of its cities Timbuktu was a center of learning–people came from everywhere to study and to enjoy the lively social and artistic culture. There was a medical school that taught delicate eye operations to remove cataracts. Mansa Musa was one of the famous rulers of Mali in the 1300s. He brought architects and scholars into Mali. His rule was known for prosperity and stability of the country as well as for artistic, educational and technological achievement.

Europe in the middle ages was backwards, disease ridden, poor oppressed and warlike.

In the 1300s the plague swept through Europe killing up to a half of the population and destroying the already impoverished agricultural economy of feudalism.


Europe rescued itself by its assault on Africa. In 1415 Henry the Navigator (never sailed a ship) sent Portuguese fleets out to the west coast of Africa to attempt to gain control of the wealthy African trade in gold, silver and other resources–trade that had gone on for centuries–millennia–connecting trade routes to the Middle East and Asia. They found African people themselves to be their most valuable commodity. The Arabs had a trade in African people as slaves for a thousand years. The slave trade started almost 80 years before Columbus sailed for the Americas By 1500 Portugal had extracted 700 tons of African gold, shipping it to Portugal and had kidnapped more than 81,000 African people into slavery.


Men, women and children in chains were stacked on top of each other on pallets in the holds of ships with the hideous stench of open pits of human waste. The pallets (seen on the lower left) were no more than 15 inches high. Hundreds of thousands of African people died of disease or starvation, or were murdered for attempted resistance and thrown overboard. The ecology of the Atlantic Ocean was changed by the slave trade. Schools of sharks would follow the slave ships to feed off the African men, women and children who died and were murdered on board and who were thrown overboard.

The trade in African people was the key ingredient in the triangular trade bringing captives from Africa as forced labor for the plantations of the Americas, transporting resources such as cotton, sugar, tobacco and rum to North America and to England.


Along with the assault on Africa was the genocide against the Indigenous people and the theft of their land and resources. Above is aftermath of U.S. slaughter at Wounded Knee in 1890. And VOLUNTEER cavalry.

This slaughter, genocide, rape and plunder of the peoples of the Earth brought unprecedented wealth into Europe for the first time.

This is what brought about the industrial revolution and transform Europe from feudalism to capitalism.

In the U.S. the “founding fathers” were slave masters, owners of African people and instigators of the genocide against the Indigenous people. This is the “founding values” of America. This slide shows an idealized, falsified serene picture of the treatment by George Washington of enslaved Africans who was known for his brutality. Washington “owned” more than 300 African people, giving them meager daily rations of a few ounces of grain and fish by-products.

There were tens of thousands of burnings and lynchings like this one in Kansas City.


Children at lynchings

As Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and leader of the Uhuru Movement states all classes of white people sit on the pedestal of the enslavement of African people and colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.

Wall Street was the center of New York’s slave auction blocks. In the 18th and 19th centuries enslaved Africans were one fifth the population of New York. When the civil war was declared, New York was so dependent on the cotton industry that the city considered joining the Confederacy. It is telling that an African cemetery was found in recent years under the high rise buildings of Wall Streets—American wealth resting literally on the bodies of African people.

White people sit on the pedestal of slavery and genocide.


Throughout Africa and the Americas the resistance of African people was fierce and powerful. We do not learn enough about that–covered over in history books. On the slave ships resistance was the major cause of death for captain and crew. The African Revolution in Haiti in the early 19th century, resistance by the Maroons in the Caribbean and South America the resistance of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, two city-wide African rebellions in New York City, Gabriel Prosser, Cinque, Harriet Tubman. In Brazil, Surinam–everywhere Africans were enslaved they were in a state of resistance.

The Shona, Zulu, Chokwe and many other African peoples waged fierce resistance to colonialism and the colonial borders imposed by the Berlin conference. The Ashanti people in Ghana waged armed resistance to the British for 200 years.Above is Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti woman resistance leader in 1900.


King Leopold of Belgium was a leading Abolitionist of his day. He was responsible for turning Congo into a rubber plantation to provide tires for bicycles and the newly emerging automobile industry in Europe and the U.S. in the 1890s. At least 10 million Africans were slaughtered by Leopold’s forces before there was even a word for genocide. Millions had their hands chopped off for resisting being enslaved on their own land. People were sexually assaulted and mutilated. Children were stolen from their parents and taken into camps to be groomed as a colonial army–genocide under international law. Leopold GAVE Congo to Belgium–it was his personal business!

The scramble for Africa and Africa’s resources. At least two million Africans were killed in the scramble for ivory tusks for piano keys and billiard balls–the center of the ivory trade was Connecticut.

80 percent of the Nama and Herero peoples in Namibia were wiped out by the Germans They were rounded up and left to die in the desert without food, water or shelter to die a slow torturous death. Germany has never recognized this genocide or paid reparations even as they paid billions in reparations to Israel. Same methods used by Hitler.


During this same time the British colonizer Cecil Rhodes came to southern Africa. Rhodes was an ideological colonizer. He believed in British imperialism and promoted it. He said to “prevent civil war you must become an imperialist “ among the workers of England….He created the Rhodes scholarship.

His goal was to install British imperialism from Cape Town to Cairo and built the Cape-Cairo railway.

His vision was part of the British empire on which they boasted “the sun never set” because it went around the world. The British empire included 77 countries including India and15 countries in Africa. 458 million people were oppressed in this empire–one quarter of the world’s population at that time under British colonialism. At that time England had the highest standard of living in the world based on the near starvation of the people in Africa, India and the other colonies.

Cecil Rhodes was a perpetrator of genocide, responsible for the displacement of millions of African people for the benefit of white settlers and enslavement of African people on their own land. White people came from Europe and became wealthy from the theft of the gold and diamonds in Southern Africa. Pass laws.

Cecil Rhodes founded DeBeers diamond cartel. Rhodes went to south Africa from Britain when he was 18 years sold–he took over the diamond mines at Kimberley south Africa and others in the area. By his early 20s he was a millionaire but he did not retire–he believed in subjugating Africa for the benefit of England.

Rhodes went to Zimbabwe, the land of the Matabele and Shona who launched fierce resistance led by their leader Lobengula.

Rhodes paid a mercenary army from England and stocked them with Maxim machine guns. With just 5 machine guns the English slaughtered 5,000 African people in one afternoon alone–then they celebrated with dinner and champagne.

Winston Churchill and Baden Powell boy scouts. Cecil Rhodes, gay, said he, “thoroughly enjoyed the outing.” Saw the slaughter of Africans as sport and adventure.

The Chokwe, Shona and Zulu people were among those who led powerful struggles against the European invasions.

Cecil Rhodes helped set up the apartheid system in south Africa and the pass laws–based on the Jim Crow laws of the United States.

Pass laws, colonial taxation of African people to force them to work to be used as near slave labor in the diamond mines.

Africans in the diamond mines were forced to stay away from family and wife, in compounds with only cold tea and bread.–much the same conditions today.


When Cecil Rhodes died the DeBeers diamond cartel was taken over by the Oppenheimer family.

The atrocities that took place in Sierra Leone and West Africa were what DeBeers itself has done to African people for a hundred years. On knees Africans, with cans, body cavity searches, Zulu forced to pull rickshaw for owners.

Diamonds have long played a role in neocolonialism in Africa. Mobutu’s villa on the Riviera , his diamonds, Mobutu one of richest men in the world which says something about the worth of the resources in Congo. CIA worked with Kennedy, Eisenhower and DeBeers to assassinate Lumumba.

Neocolonialism continues today. Mandela with Nicky Oppenheimer in front of statue of Cecil Rhodes. Mandela has praised DeBeers and Cecil Rhodes. Below: Mandela with Mobutu

Under Mandela and the ANC the conditions are worse for African workers and better for white people. Today 12 years after the end of apartheid, 61 percent of African people live below the poverty line in South Africa, while only one percent of whites. 96 percent of commercial arable land is still in the hands of whites. Conditions are 14 percent BETTER for white people than they were under apartheid.

Africa also has up to 90 percent of the world’s reserves of cobalt, manganese, chromium and platinum–in West and Southern Africa. U.S. military needs these to function in the defense industry. Pentagon report say they would do anything to maintain those resources.

U.S. military and AFRICOM in Africa–says its in the name of “war on terror” U.S. military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations.US has more than 700 military bases–growing to 1000 by end of decade in 130 countries around the world.

What is the solution?

Our lifestyle requires the suffering of African people–in this country There is colonialism inside the U.S. Two Americas Wake up to reality.

In Africa–our lives are at the expense of African people.

African people are a colony inside the U.S.–not racism- not ideas inside our heads–political and economic relationship–same as in Iraq, Palestine etc. Two Americas.

Uhuru Movement is led by Omali Yeshitela, leader of the African People’s Socialist Party, united African People around the world for one united and liberated Africa. In the spirit of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba.

Africans are one people all over the world.

Not charity, not peace corps, missionaries, movie stars adopting African babies.

African resources belong to African people everywhere!

Building the African Socialist International around the world. Touch One! Touch All!

Africa in the hands of African working class people, not neocolonialists.

Unite with the struggle for reparations to African people!



Thursday, March 26, 2015

Fighting words from #RhodesMustFall activists Author: Lauren Hess - Rhodes Statue -


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(Lauren Hess, News24)

“The future is moving a lot faster than your consciousness.”

These were the fighting words of one UCT student to those who believe that the statue of Cecil John Rhodes must remain in its current place at the university.

The student was one of dozens of people, including staff, to speak at an assembly held by the university to discuss the statue and the apparent lack of transformation at the institution.

The assembly got off to a tense start when Professor Barney Pityana was replaced as meeting chairperson because students felt he was not impartial. He was replaced by Kgotso Chikane.

UCT made headlines earlier in March when students threw faeces and urine on the base of the Rhodes statue during a protest against “white imperialism”.

Many students took to the podium in Jameson Hall to speak of hate speech, much of it online, they have encountered since their protest began.

Another student alleged that campus security assaulted her and two other students earlier this week while a staff member merely looked on.

A few staff members also voiced their concerns, with one, Dr Darlene Miller, a 53-year-old coloured sociology lecturer at UCT with a PhD, revealing that she is only paid R9 600.

"We have the knowledge. The environment has been so hostile. Welcome us back; we will come," Miller said of South Africa’s universities.

Adam Haupt, the associate professor of media studies at UCT, congratulated students on their activism and reminded them that the bid to rid the university of the Rhodes statue was “just the beginning of the battle”. 

White students who support the bid to remove the statue also urged white South Africans to show more empathy to black South Africans and to “face their own prejudices”. 

The assembly ended with #RhodesMustFall activists taking to the stage at Jameson Hall and singing struggle songs. 

 

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

According to Dailysun.co.za - KING ZWELITHINI said "I WON'T APOLOGISE!" - Foreigners must go back to their homes

King Goodwill Zwelithini stands by his view that foreigners should go back to their home countries.               Photo by Jabulani Langa

KING Goodwill Zwelithini meant each and every word when he said foreigners must pack their bags and get out of South Africa.

So said Zwelithini’s spokesman, Prince Thulani Zulu, who told Daily Sun yesterday the king has nothing to be sorry for.

The Zulu king’s outburst came on Saturday during his speech at a moral regeneration event in Pongola, northern KZN. 

In the presence of both Police Minister Nathi Nhleko and provincial MEC Willies Mchunu, the king was reported to have told the gathering that it was time foreigners were told to return to their countries. 

The king accused them of messing up the country’s towns by hanging their fake clothing brands on the streets.

“Now when you walk down the street you can’t recognise a shop you used to know because it has been taken over by foreigners who mess it up by hanging up rags,” the king said.

His remarks were widely condemned as encouraging hatred towards foreigners, which may result in more violent behaviour towards them.

But Prince Thulani said the king won’t apologise because he stood by what he said.

“I think the people who’re complaining are misinterpreting his speech. 

“He didn’t say foreigners must be attacked or harassed. 

“The king was talking about foreigners who are here illegally. 

“Some are involved in serious crimes like drug and human trafficking. 

“We don’t need such people in our country so the king is right,” said Zulu.

The king’s speech has been strongly criticised for fuelling hatred against foreigners by the Somali Association of South Africa and the Congolese Solidarity Campaign. 

The provincial government distanced itself from the king’s speech. It said it was guided by the Constitution, which guarantees human rights for all in SA.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

According to the citizen.co.za - Foreigners must go home said King Zwelithini

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi and President Jacob Zuma with Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini (far right) during his wedding at Ondini Sports Complex on July 26, 2014 in Ulundi, South Africa. Mafu was selected as the king's bride at the age of 18 while participating in the 2003 Swazi reed dance, she is Zwelithini's sixth wife. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sowetan / Thulani Mbele)
Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi and President Jacob Zuma with Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini (far right) during his wedding at Ondini Sports Complex on July 26, 2014 in Ulundi, South Africa. Mafu was selected as the king's bride at the age of 18 while participating in the 2003 Swazi reed dance, she is Zwelithini's sixth wife. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sowetan / Thulani Mbele)

Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has called for the deportation of foreign nationals living in the country, saying it was unacceptable locals were being made to compete with people from other countries for the few economic opportunities available.

Addressing Pongolo community members during a moral regeneration event on Friday, Zwelithini accused government of failing to protect locals from the “influx of foreign nationals”.  “Most government leaders do not want to speak out on this  matter because they are scared  of losing votes.  “As the king of the Zulu nation, I cannot tolerate a situation where we are being led by leaders with no views whatsoever.

“We are requesting those who come from outside to please go back to their countries,” Zwelithini said. “The fact that there were countries that played a role in the country’s struggle for liberation should not be used as an excuse to create a situation where foreigners are allowed to inconvenience locals. “I know you were in their countries during the struggle for liberation. But the fact of the matter is you did not set up businesses in their countries,” he said.

Zwelithini, who spoke from a prepared speech, which is in The Citizen‘s possession, made the remarks in the presence of Police Minister Nathi Nhleko and KZN community MEC Willies Mchunu. The king’s remarks are made against the backdrop of rising tensions between foreign nationals and locals in the wake of recent xenophobic attacks in the country. The violence began in Soweto, Gauteng, in January and later spread to KwaZulu-Natal, where it has claimed three lives so far.

The DA yesterday described Zwethini’s comments as “highly irresponsible”. “Particularly given the recent spate of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, he should do the right thing – retract and apologise,” DA national spokesperson Phumzile van Damme said. The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) said it was looking into the matter. “His utterances, if proven true, would border on xenophobic,” SAHRC spokesperson Isaac Mangena said.

The king’s spokesperson Judge Jerome Ngwenya declined to comment. – cliven@citizen.co.za


Sunday, March 22, 2015

Zuma - Welcome home JB Marks


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The remains of struggle hero JB Marks, who died in Moscow, arrives for reburial in Ventersdorp. (BBPG via Twitter)

Struggle hero John Beaver "JB" Marks worked with immeasurable commitment and dedication to ensure that South Africa belonged to all who lived in it, President Jacob Zuma said at his reburial on Sunday.

"Welcome home Comrade JB Marks. Welcome home our leader, commissar, intellectual, soldier, teacher and accomplished revolutionary," Zuma said in a speech prepared for delivery in Ventersdorp, North West.

"Your soul may now rest in eternal peace, on home soil, on South African soil."

Zuma said that Marks was a distinguished South African who was totally committed and dedicated to freedom, equality, justice and human rights for all.

Zuma said Marks noticed when African students and white students were treated differently at the teacher training college he attended and could see that black African students were discriminated against, Zuma said.

"He then made it his mission to mobilise other students and showing them exactly how the conditions they were subjected to warranted a revolt," said Zuma.

"It was the beginning of the conscientisation of this remarkable revolutionary."

Zuma said that Marks was one of the leaders who played a key role in the Communist Party-led anti-pass campaign of 1944, which drew 20 000 people, including ANC members.

Marks' success was "remarkable" and he managed to mobilise workers from various countries from Southern Africa under one banner and purpose, said Zuma.

"He raised their level of political consciousness and collapsed the nationality and tribal divisions that the system had imposed to prevent collective action."

Zuma said that Marks was "the unifier" and he was an ANC leader, a trade unionist and a communist and saw no contradiction between the three roles.

A political activist and trade unionist Marks, served as president of the Transvaal Branch of the African National Congress and was elected chairman of the SA Communist Party in 1962.

In 1963 he was sent to the ANC external mission in Tanzania.

He became ill in 1971 and went to the then-Soviet Union. He died of a heart attack in Moscow the following year.

Marks was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

On Sunday, Zuma said the fact that Marks was to be buried in Ventersdorp should be a source of pride for all residents and said it should open a new chapter of unity, reconciliation and healing in the town.

Celebrating his life

"We extend our gratitude to the family of Comrade John Beaver Marks for your resilience and understanding that you share Uncle JB with the whole country," said Zuma.

He said the reburial of Marks was an end of a painful era and the beginning of a new chapter of celebrating his life.

"We should ensure that we tell the story of Comrade JB Marks so that our children and youth would know about this distinguished leader and revolutionary who hated racism and the oppression of people because of the colour of their skin, and who wanted only the best for his country and people."

Congress of the People on Sunday said it had a very deep and abiding appreciation for Marks, who sacrificed enormously in our common interest.

Cope said that Marks got involved in the freedom struggle when the risks were inordinately high.

"He was not deterred by the choice he had to make because he knew that his struggle as well as that of others like him was noble and a just struggle," Cope said in a statement.

"He and his fellow comrades focused their minds with a singular concentration on attaining freedom for all the people of our country."

Friday, March 20, 2015

Fury over Dompas-like cards in the Western Cape


Image: The Breede Valley Municipality has condemned the "green card system". (SABC)

African National Congress (ANC) members in the Boland regional in the Western Cape are demonstrating in Worcester to highlight a concern regarding what it calls the violation of the country's constitution.

Regional secretary, Zinzo Mtini says they want the BreĂ«de Valley Municipality to stop the issuing of "Green Cards" allegedly by the town's local policing forum. 

“The ANC in the region discovered there's a green card system issued to gardeners and domestic workers when they had to enter the white areas. We believe as the ANC this is against the constitution of the country, which was adopted in 1996.” 

Meanwhile, the Breede Valley Municipality has condemned the "green card system". In a statement the Mayor, Antoinette Steyn, says the DA-led municipality has nothing to do with the so called Worcester Dompas.  

Steyn claims the green cards were issued by the police and that the ANC should direct their memorandum to SA Police Service (SAPS).

During the debate on the vote of no confidence motion brought by the DA against President Jacob Zuma, an ANC MP claimed that drugs were found at Mmusi Maimane's church. When asked if he was prepared to take a question regarding the drugs found in his church, Maimane responded "No"

The DA's Mmusi Maimane.

Image by: ESA ALEXANDER

When asked if he was prepared to take a question regarding the drugs found in his church, Maimane responded "No"

Maimane moonlights as a pastor at Liberty Church - where police found an abandoned packet of tik in a raid last Friday.

According to The Sowetan Roodepoort police spokeswoman Nonhlanhla Khumalo said that the drugs have been confiscated as an exhibit, but because they weren't actually found on anyone no case has been opened.

The raid was apparently conducted during a youth service with the church's permission.

Parents apparently were not charmed with how the raid was conducted.

"Some of the kids complained that they were sexually harassed and some say they were manhandled by the police. Pastor Maimane was not there and it was just the youth," an insider told the newspaper.

"We have communicated to the captain [of the police station] that the raid be investigated. So that is where the matter sits at the moment, it will face its own judicial process," Mmusi Maimane told the paper.


On 21 March 1960 at least 180 black Africans were injured (there are claims of as many as 300) and 69 killed when South African police opened fire on approximately 300 demonstrators, who were protesting against the pass laws, at the township of Sharpeville

Image: 69 coffins of killed demonstrators in Sharpville 

On 21 March 1960 at least 180 black Africans were injured (there are claims of as many as 300) and 69 killed when South African police opened fire on approximately 300 demonstrators, who were protesting against the pass laws, at the township of Sharpeville, near Vereeniging in the Transvaal. In similar demonstrations at the police station in Vanderbijlpark, another person was shot. 


Later that day 

at Langa, a township outside Cape Town, police baton charged and fired tear gas at the gathered protesters, shooting three and injuring several others. 


The Sharpeville Massacre, as the event has become known, signalled the start of armed resistance in South Africa, and prompted worldwide condemnation of South Africa's Apartheid policies.


A build-up to the massacre

On 13 May 1902 the treaty which ended the Anglo-Boer War was signed at Vereeniging; it 

signified a new era of cooperation between English and Afrikaner living in Southern Africa. By 1910, the two Afrikaner states of Orange River Colony (Oranje Vrij Staat) and Transvaal (Zuid Afrikaansche Republick) were joined with Cape Colony and Natal..... 

Sharpeville Massacre ....

 The repression of black Africans became entrenched in the constitution of the new union (although perhaps not intentionally) and the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.


After the Second World War the Herstigte ('Reformed' or 'Pure') National Party (HNP) came into power (by a slender majority, created through a coalition with the otherwise insignificant Afrikaner Party 

signified a new era of cooperation between English and Afrikaner living in Southern Africa. By 1910, the two Afrikaner states of Orange River Colony (Oranje Vrij Staat) and Transvaal (Zuid Afrikaansche Republick) were joined with Cape Colony and Natal.

Sharpeville Massacre 

as the Union of South Africa. 


The repression of black Africans became entrenched in the constitution of the new union (although perhaps not intentionally) and the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

After the Second World War the Herstigte ('Reformed' or 'Pure') National Party (HNP) came into power (by a slender majority, created through a coalition with the otherwise insignificant Afrikaner Party

 

) in 1948. 


Its members had been disaffected from the previous government, the United Party, in 1933, and had smarted at the government's accord with Britain during the war. Within a year the Mixed Marriages Act was instituted the first of many segregationist laws devised to separate privileged white South Africans from the black African masses. By 1958, with the election of Hendrik Verwoerd, (white) South Africa was completely entrenched in the philosophy of Apartheid.


There was opposition to the government's policies. The African National Congress (ANC) was working within the law against all forms of racial discrimination in South Africa. In 1956 had committed itself to a South Africa which "belongs to all." 


A peaceful demonstration in June that same year, at which the ANC (and other anti-Apartheid groups) approved the Freedom Charter, led to the arrest of 156 anti-Apartheid leaders and the 'Treason Trial' which lasted until 1961.

By the late 1950s some of ANCs members had become disillusioned with the 'peaceful' response. Known as 'Africanists' this select group was opposed to a multi-racial future for South Africa. 


The Africanists followed a philosophy that a racially assertive sense of nationalism was needed to mobilise the masses, and they advocated a strategy of mass action (boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation). The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) was formed in April 1959, with Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe as president.


The PAC and ANC did not agree on policy, and it seemed unlikely in 1959 that they would co-operate in any manner. The ANC planned a campaign of demonstration against the pass laws to start at the beginning of April 1960. The PAC rushed ahead and announced a similar demonstration, to start ten days earlier, effectively hijacking the ANC campaign.


The PAC called for "African males in every city and village... to leave their passes at home, join demonstrations and, if arrested, [to] offer no bail, no defence, [and] no fine."


On 16 March 1960 Sobukwe wrote to the commissioner of police, Major General Rademeyer, stating that the PAC would beholding a five-day, non-violent, disciplined, and sustained protest campaign against pass laws, starting on 21 March


At a press conference on 18 March he further stated: "I have appealed to the African people to make sure that this campaign is conducted in a spirit of absolute non-violence, and I am quite certain they will heed my call. If the other side so desires, we will provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how brutal they can be." The PAC leadership was hopeful of some kind of physical response.

A few days before the massacre a pamphlet was circulated in the townships near Vereeniging (Sharpeville, Bophelong, Boipatong, and Evaton) calling for people to stay away from work on the Monday. The PAC, however, was not prepared to leave the demonstration to public choice. 


Testimony was given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings that the telephone lines between Sharpeville and 

Vereeniging were cut on the Sunday evening, and that (some) bus drivers were detained until the Monday morning to stop people traveling out of Sharpeville to work. 
"Evidence before the Commission points to a degree of coercion of non-politicised Sharpville residents who were pressurised into participating in the anti-pass protest."3

By 10 in the morning almost 5,000 protesters had congregated in the centre of Sharpeville, from where they walked 

to the police compound. 


Similar groups (about 4,000 in total) walked from Bophelong and Boipatong to the police station at Vanderbijlpark, whilst a larger gathering of almost 20,000 people formed at the police station in Evaton.


The crowd at Evaton was 

dispersed by low-flying Sabre jets, and that at Vanderbijlpark was dispersed by a baton charge and tear gas. One person was killed at Vanderbijlpark when the police opened fire in response (the police claimed) to stone throwing by the crowd. 


At Sharpville, with a number of PAC officials in the crowd, the low-flying jets had no effect. The crowd remained around the police compound, waiting for a PAC

 

statement to be read out.

In the official TRC version of events the police remained passive until one-fifteen. 


Despite claims in the press in 1960 (and still in many reports) that squads of police went out into the crowd to arrest PAC officials, no action was actually taken by the police against the PAC at that time. "The police refused to arrest PAC members who presented themselves for arrest."


Police accusations that the PAC leadership refused to instruct the crowd to disperse, however, were deemed false: various officials did in fact ask them to move away from the compound's fence. Only 300 or so protesters were still in the vicinity when the shooting started (this means, however, that the police managed to shoot almost all those near to the compound). 


By mid-day the small contingent of police normally present at the station (12 in all) had been boosted significantly: nearly 300 armed police and five Saracens (armoured vehicles) were present.

No one knows why the first shot was fired. The police claim it was in response to stone throwing by the crowd, and although this is mostly dismissed, such debris is visible amongst the fallen bodies and discarded footwear in photographs of the aftermath. 


The first shots being fired in response by inexperienced and nervous officers. (Rarely mentioned in contemporary reports is that the police were nervous because, only a few weeks before, nine policemen had been killed by a mob at Cato Manor, a township outside Durban.) 


Eyewitnesses from the crowd claim that an order was given to fire, or that the banging of a Saracen door was mistaken for gunfire from the crowd. No firm evidence for any weapons amongst the crowd (guns or traditional spears and knobkerries) has ever been given. 


The TRC concluded that there was a "degree of deliberation in the decision to open fire at Sharpville" which indicated "that the shooting was more than the result of inexperienced and frightened police officers losing their nerve."


Somewhere between 50 and 75 of the police opened fire. The crowd initially confused, and perhaps thinking the police were using blanks, stood still. It was not until the bodies started to fall that they ran. 


The police continued to shoot the protesters even as they fled from the site. Of the 180 injured, only 30 had been shot from the front. The injured included 31 women and 19 children, while among the 69 killed, eight were women and ten children.

It took a while for emergency services to arrive (the telephone lines had been cut) and the police were slow to provide help. 


Following the massacre, the police made 77 arrests, including several people still receiving treatment in hospital (they were placed under guard until they were fit enough to be detained). Of those arrested, 55 were later released.


In September that year 224 civil claims for damages were served against the Minister of Justice. The government's response was the Indemnity Act (1961): legislation that indemnified the government and its officials retrospectively against such claims.


(Shortly afterwards, in response to public pressure, the government set up a committee to examine the claims and to recommend ex gratia payments; but 

few were actually paid out.)

What caused worldwide condemnation was not so much the deaths (such killings are more common that we would like to think: Frank Welsh in his History of South Africa compares it to 'Bloody Sunday', Londonderry January 1972, and the shooting of Kent State University students, Ohio 1970) but the callous way in which the Apartheid government put the blame squarely on the dead and injured.

It had only been six weeks since the 

British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had given his "winds of change" speech in Cape Town. Britain, who had consistently vetoed United Nation sanctions against South Africa could no longer condone South Africa's actions. (In April 1960 the only UN

 

member not to condemn the event was South Africa itself.) 


Curiously, although there was worldwide condemnation, South African exports to Europe increased by 50%, to America by 65%, and to Asia by 300% during this period.

Rather than instigate a change in policy, Apartheid was more rigidly applied. A state of emergency was declared on 30 March (it lasted until 31 August 1960) and 18,000 black strikers

 

were detained. On 8 April the Unlawful Organisations Act (1960) declared both the ANC and PAC illegal. The following day a disgruntled farmer, David Pratt, attempted to assassinate the South African Premier Dr Hendrik Verwoerd. Rather than have a white man be held culpable for the assassination attempt, Pratt was found mentally ill.


A referendum of the white electorate in South Africa in October 1960 voted for a republic government (52% to 47%, reflecting the division between Afrikaans and English voters). Verwoerd consequently withdrew South Africa from the Commonwealth of Nations in March 1961 and South Africa became a republic on 31 May 1961.

In the crisis that followed the ANC and PAC were banned, and the 'armed struggle' was launched. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and several others in the ANC leadership formed its military wing, Umkonto we Sizwe or MK (the Spear of the Nation), on a farm at Rivonia. 


Mandela acted as chief-of-staff, launching the MK's sabotage campaign in December 1961. The Rivonia farm was raided in 1963 and the consequent arrests resulted in the infamous 'Rivonia' Trial which lead to the imprisonment for life of several ANC leaders (on Robben Island). The PAC also set up its armed wing, POQO, which means independent ' or 'stand alone' (the PAC was completely opposed to multi-racial solutions in Africa) in 1961.


Following the ban the ANC and PAC were forced to go underground and operate from outside South Africa. Internal opposition was left to people like Steve Biko and the members of the Black Consciousness Movement.

In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 March, the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In 1996, on the 26th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, Nelson Mandela chose Sharpeville as the site to announce the signing of the new democratic constitution. The day is now commemorated as South Africa's Human Rights Day.


References:

1. Africa since 1935 Vol VIII of the UNESCO General History of Africa, editor Ali Mazrui, published by James Currey, 1999, p259-60.