Sharpeville, South Africa – Paulina Mathinye was five years old when her father left home for a meeting near the police station in Sharpeville, a township south of Johannesburg. She remembers waiting for him to return. But then he never came back.” Police opened fire on the protesters that day in what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre.
Apartheid-era police records put the death toll at 69 and the number of injured at 180. Research published in 2024 using police records found that as many as 91 people may have been killed and 238 injured. The higher figures are also cited by lawyers representing Sharpeville survivors and families.
The massacre became a defining moment in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. March 21 is now commemorated as Human Rights Day, and South Africa’s democratic Constitution was signed in Sharpeville in 1996. But for the families of those killed and injured, the consequences did not end that day.
More than six decades later, survivors and relatives are seeking redress through the courts. Lawyers for Human Rights has filed an application in the Gauteng High Court challenging the continued existence of the Indemnity Act 61 of 1961, an apartheid-era law that the applicants say prevented survivors and dependants of those killed from pursuing civil and criminal proceedings arising from the massacre. The applicants are also seeking certification of a class action involving survivors who were shot and dependants of those killed.
For Mathinye, the legal fight is inseparable from the life that followed her father’s death. He had been the family’s breadwinner. After he was killed, her mother worked as a domestic worker to support five children.
We sometimes go to school and when we come back from school we find nothing to eat.” There was no electricity, and sometimes her mother could not afford even a candle for the children to study. Struggle even to buy a candle, a mere candle.” She stayed in school and applied to study further, but her family could not afford it. She eventually began working while still young to help support her mother and siblings.
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