Sharpeville massacre survivors demand compensation 66 years after apartheid killing

On a clear morning in March 1960, Abraham Mofokeng was twenty years old and working in a factory when he joined thousands of others gathering outside a police station in Sharpeville, a township forty miles south of Johannesburg. They had come to protest pass laws—regulations that required Black, Indian, and Coloured South Africans to carry documents at all times specifying where they were permitted to travel and live. The Pan Africanist Congress had organized dozens of similar demonstrations across the country that day. The weather was bright. No one expected what would follow.

Without warning, police opened fire on the crowd. At least ninety-one people were killed and two hundred thirty-eight wounded in what became known as the Sharpeville massacre. Mofokeng was shot twice—a bullet grazed his right foot as he fled, and another lodged itself in his spine, where it remains sixty-six years later. He watched a woman fall in front of him and kept running, only realizing he had been hit when he saw blood running down his legs.

Now eighty-six, Mofokeng is one of three survivors suing the South African government for compensation. The case, filed in September 2026, represents a test claim that could open the door for dozens more. He is seeking approximately twenty-three thousand pounds—a sum that reflects not just the immediate injury but the decades of suffering that followed. After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its work in 2003, Mofokeng received a single payment of thirty thousand rand. The commission had recommended annual payments of twenty thousand rand for six years, but those never materialized. "We continued to suffer," he said. "Especially now I am struggling and my health is not up to standard."

The other two claimants were children when their fathers died that day. Paulina Mathinye was five years old when her father, Samson, was shot. She remembered running to greet him when he returned from work, and he would lift her up. After the massacre, she kept asking her mother why she was crying, not understanding what had happened. Her mother, left to raise five children on a domestic worker's wages, could not afford to send Paulina to teacher training college. She left school at seventeen to find work instead. Now seventy-one, Mathinye still lives in the same house her father did. "Some of my friends are teachers, some of them are nurses," she said, "and I'm staying in the same house that my father did."

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, police claimed protesters had been throwing rocks. The local police commander told the Guardian the next day that he did not know how many shots were fired, that the crowd had surrounded the station, and that if people "do these things they must learn their lesson the hard way." Four months later, in July 1961, the white minority government passed a law indemnifying itself and anyone acting under its authority from prosecution for actions taken "in good faith" to prevent disorder or maintain public safety. The law was made retroactive to the date of the massacre and remains in force today. The claimants' legal team argues it is unconstitutional.

This compensation case is part of a broader wave of litigation demanding accountability for apartheid-era crimes. In January 2025, twenty-five survivors and relatives of victims sued the government for failing to prosecute cases that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had referred to prosecutors. That May, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a judicial inquiry into potential political interference in those decisions—an inquiry still ongoing. The litigation reflects deepening disillusionment with ANC-led governments that have failed, over more than three decades since apartheid ended, to address South Africa's vast racial inequality and poverty.

Vincent Thamae, a Pan Africanist Congress member supporting the massacre victims, framed the compensation claim in broader terms. The dispossession of Black South Africans began long before 1960—with forced removals from productive land, exclusion from the economy, and confinement to townships. "When people talk about compensation now," he said, "compensation is a concept to them that includes all the land that they lost, the economy that they were taken out of and even how they have been treated in the new democracy." If this test case succeeds, it will signal that the legal reckoning with apartheid is far from over.