A Convenient Massacre: Did Sharpeville Save Apartheid?

Abstract

This dissertation is focussed on the re-examination and critique of the veracity of the accepted narrative of a seminal event in the history of the struggle against apartheid. It utilises a two-tiered approach using non-traditional methods to challenge traditional South African historiography. In the first section theatre is used as a vehicle to re-evaluate the ideas of the Pan-Africanists by bringing the words of their leader Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe to the stage. The correspondence between the imprisoned Sobukwe and his friend, journalist Benjamin Pogrund, is dramatized in the style of Verbatim Theatre, creating an historical document in dramatic form.

The second section of the dissertation examines the rapid ascension of Sobukwe's Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and how his Pan Africanist vision, incorporating a United States of Africa, had begun to resonate in South Africa. After this background, rarely asked but important questions are posed: How would the history of South Africa (and Africa itself) been different had the Sharpeville Massacre not taken place? What if the demonstration had resolved itself peacefully? What would have transpired if ergo the PAC and the African National Congress (ANC) had not been banned? These and other questions are answered, and disparate outcomes from which to examine history are created, through the construction of a Virtual History for South Africa had events unfolded differently. Finally, international influences are re-assessed from within the paradigm of a South Africa in which this event, and its aftermath, had not transpired.