PlaceLayers › Historic moments › Africa › Sharpeville massacre

Sharpeville massacre

Name: Sharpeville massacre
Start: 1960-01-01
Location: Sharpeville massacre, Vereeniging, Vereeniging

Sharpeville massacre · Vereeniging, Vereeniging · 1960-01-01

The Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960, when police opened fire on a crowd of people who had assembled outside the police station in the township of Sharpeville in the then Transvaal Province of the then Union of South Africa (today part of Gauteng) to protest against the apartheid system and its pass laws.

The record

Date	1960-01-01
Place	Sharpeville massacre, Vereeniging, Vereeniging
Coordinates	-26.68833, 27.87194 (landmark-level precision)
Scope	Local interest
Sources	en.wikipedia · Wikidata Q518753
Added	2026-08-14 · source: wikipedia-en

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
National and municipal archives of Vereeniging, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Newsreel and archive film of events like this often survives. Search YouTube for this event If you find good footage, send us the link and we will attach it to this page.

Time layers at this place

One place, several moments in time. This location has 3 recorded time layers between 1960 and 1960 — slide through them:

Sharpeville Human Rights Precinct

1960 — Sharpeville
1960 — Sharpeville massacre this page
1960 — Sharpeville Human Rights Precinct

Harvested from a regional source. This entry came out of en.wikipedia rather than being written here, which is why it is short and why it is marked as needing a check. It is published as a lead for someone who knows the place: fill it in.

You can add to this page

This entry is a skeleton on purpose. If you were there, if your family was, or if you simply know the place: photographs (yours or ones you have the right to share), comments and corrections to the record above, and observations — what the place was like before, after, what the books get wrong. Everything is read by a person before publication and credited the way you ask.

What readers have added

Nothing yet — this place is waiting for its first memory. The form below takes a date, a story, photographs and links.

Do you know something about Sharpeville massacre, Vereeniging?

Old photographs, what your family remembers being on the corner, a shop that is not on any map we have. Contributions are read by a person before anything is published, and we never publish the names of living people.

Nearby in Africa

An event, not a property assessment. This page records what happened at a location. It says nothing about the condition, value or safety of any property there, and it is not part of any environmental record. Methodology and limits.