SHIFTING GOAL POSTS: IS THIS WHAT THE STRUGGLE WAS ABOUT?

When I was younger my cousin Mpho and I would play football in our backyard and we would use bricks as goal posts. We would set them a certain width and length apart. After playing for some time and goals being scored the losing party, usually me, would suggest reducing the width of the goal posts or the length of the field. This would go on until it was clear that there was no chance of me winning.

I remember when my family moved to Bedworthpark, a suburb separated by a street from Sharpeville.  It didn’t mean anything to me then because I did not know that 3km from my house was a graveyard where 69 brave men who were killed because they didn’t want to carry dompasses were buried.

Living so close to Sharpeville meant nothing until my aunt, who went into exile in 1961, insisted on going into Sharpeville the first time she visited us. I remember her saying that it was because of Sharpeville that she was able to escape South Africa.

Sharpeville is a tiny township. Under developed even by Vaal township standards. Yet it has a place in South African history that until this week I believed could not be denied. For people like my aunt who were smuggled out of South Africa through the Vaal into Lesotho, Sharpeville is where they got saved.

The PAC declaring that men should abandon their dompasses might have been a nationwide call, but it was in Sharpeville where the tragedy that highlighted the ill that apartheid was happened. It was Sharpeville that brought rise to the arm struggle that made the National Party government ban political parties. It was Sharpeville, not Soweto, where 69 men were shot in cold blood on 21 March 1960 because they stood for what they believed in. It is Sharpeville where families lost their sons that day. 

Has the inability to share the victories of today transcended in claiming a history that is not rightfully ours? Should we punish future generations just because the PAC of today questioned why the ANC has “hijacked” Human Rights’ Day when in fact abandoning dompasses on that day was a PAC initiative?

Do we forget that those lives lost and many lost thereafter, those people who were forced to flee their families and homes into unknown countries where they died alone are why we commemorate of Human Rights’ Day. Not who should own it. Is it not my right a citizen of South Africa to know the unedited truth of my history, whether or not the victor of today was there?

The goal posts of truth in this country have been moved carelessly for over four hundred years, so what if they are being carelessly shifted now? I guess in a country where winning at any cost has always been valued more than the goal post that is truth, we do not have an answer because what is true today may not be true tomorrow. Just like those 69 men who were massacred in Sharpeville may as well have been massacred in Soweto…

After all, international media won’t know the difference.