Mr Speaker, hon members, in recognition of the indivisibility of the fundamental rights of peoples everywhere, I beg for your indulgence, as well as that of the House, to take you back to where the journey began.
We lived in an L-shaped corrugated-iron house, both well and spaciously built by my father, who worked as a deliverer and furniture polisher at a furnisher in Vereeniging. He did this with my grandfather, who was a commendable carpenter in our locality. Vukuzenzele, popularly known as Vuka, was a newly established extension of Sharpeville township. It was an area designated for black families who were forcefully removed from top locations where they held the title deeds for commercial enterprises and residential areas for white people.
Both my father and my grandfather, in my presence, frequently indulged in politics. I often observed consistent gatherings at the nearby blacksmith where my grandfather and the blacksmith, Mr Phakathi, would be reading and, at the same time, interpreting the daily political bulletins to their audience of coal merchants and vehicle owners, who had come to give their horses new shoes and their vehicles renewed sets of spring shock absorbers. The question that often triggered the excitement amongst them was, "Uthini uVerwoerd namhlanje?" [What is Verwoerd saying today?], followed by "Kodwa um-Afrika yena uthini?", which means, "But the African is saying this." The political discussion usually took the greatest part of the day.
This was one of the many formative occasions when I learned about Dr Verwoerd and his people, and that they were largely responsible for the laws that made the African people - men, women and children - suffer. I must say that at the age of 13, I was being initiated in the collective historical consciousness of African political thinking. The afternoon and night of 20 March 1960 revealed nothing suspicious for me. Moreover, at that tender age I could not clearly have imagined, let alone predicted, the political fortunes of a township about to be engulfed by human tragedy, characterised by dead and maimed people, tears, fears and rage.
The dark early hours of the morning of 21 March saw widespread calls through loudhailers and thousands of pamphlets in the streets urging the people of Sharpeville not to go to work on that day but to converge at the central police station to protest against the carrying of passes and, if need be, burn them in full glare of the authorities. Obviously, school teachers were not going to teach that day, so schoolchildren took that opportunity to give themselves a break from school.
Later that morning, some of us joined our old folk at the Sharpeville central police station. As the day progressed, the protesting crowd around the police station began to swell enormously in number and, with thumbs raised high, a resemblance of the shape of the African continent chanted loudly, "Africa Mayibuye".
From where I stood, I could spot the occasional movement of the African negotiators in and out of the front of the police station, and every time they made appearances, they would raise their thumbs high, shouting "Africa", and the crowd would echo, "Mayibuye".
By that time, a heavily armed contingent of police was prowling inside the station yard and more were arriving in police trucks and Saracens. Meanwhile the attempts by the people's negotiators, led by the late Nyakane Tsolo, whom I had the pleasure of meeting before he died, continued as previously, followed by the chant of "Mayibuye".
It was past the lunch hour when rumblings did the rounds that police officers wanted people to move away from the police station and gather at the nearby sportsfield, now known as George Thabe stadium, 2km away. The people made no movement in that direction and what happened next made me believe that had the people moved towards that sportsfield, many more people would have been killed.
First, there was the shattering sound of one shot, then silence. The chanting stopped abruptly and was immediately followed by rapid gunfire. Waves of protesters stampeded away from the fence and gates of the police station, as the firing became fierce. This time it sounded more like a combination of rifles and machine-gun fire. I could not see exactly what was happening behind me because, like everybody else, I was running away from the police station as fast as I could. The gunfire was both frightening and confusing, and there was an instant where I rushed through a gate into a yard, frantically looking for sanctuary, only to jump over the fence back into the street again, where droves of people were running away.
I remember vividly the image of a man running past me, his hand clutching his left shoulder, as if preventing his whole arm from falling off. The man had been shot. Frightened as I was, I heard him say, ironically ... Ngiyitholile i-Afrika yami. [I have found my Africa.]
I have found my Africa. It did not take long to reach home, where I became more frightened when I did not see my father or grandfather. When the shooting stopped, it began to rain hard - perhaps God's way of washing away the blood and tears of his fallen people behind me.