I dithered all day over writing something on today’s momentous and somber anniversaries in South African history. Texas in Africa beat me to the punch and did so well on the Sharpeville Massacre, which shocked the world fifty years ago today. But because of the epochal shift that Sharpeville helped to bring about it is easy to forget that twenty five years ago today, and almost unimaginably, exactly twenty-five years after Sharpeville, the South African Police opened fire on another group of unarmed South Africans who were simply trying to make their way to a funeral gathering. The Langa Massacre resulted in roughly a score dead (remarkably the death totals are disputed to this day) and many more wounded, with official totals always underestimating significantly given that many black South Africans understandably refused to go to hospitals where they feared the authorities would track them down and arrest them (or worse).
The Langa Massacre was just one momentous, shocking, terrible event in what I am identifying in what I hope will be a book as the worst year in the history of South Africa. The “long 1985,” which I argue extends from the crises arising from the cynical attempt to establish the Tricameral Parliament in the last months of 1984 (basically the government hoped to co-opt the Indian and Coloured populations by providing them with toothless houses for self-governance, excluded the mass of blacks from the equation, and those masses erupted) through the middle of 1986, was a transformative year that only later can be identified as South Africa’s tipping point. The Langa Massacre is central to understanding the chaos of that long and ugly though perhaps essential year.
