HISTORY: Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences, By Tom Lodge, Oxford University Press, 423pp. £20

THERE IS A SHARPEVILLE, or a place that is the symbolic equivalent of Sharpeville, in every revolutionary story. These are the places whose names become synonyms for the point at which the struggle is confronted by the physical might of the Establishment and from which myths and martyrs emerge. Over time, the details of the location and the facts of what may have happened become largely subordinate to the symbolism.

In South Africa, on March 21st, 1960, this dubious celebrity descended on the otherwise uninteresting African township of Sharpeville, in Transvaal province. In Northern Ireland the same thing happened to Derry on Bloody Sunday, January 30th, 1972. In China, in June 1989, it was Tiananmen Square, in Beijing. Objectively, other events in the revolutionary timeline may be just as significant or even more so. But they do not necessarily lodge in the imagination with the same resonance.

Thus, purely in security terms, the Soweto uprising of 1976 was a far greater challenge to the apartheid state than the protests at Sharpeville and elsewhere in 1960. But the details of what happened in Soweto in 1976 will be vague even to many with some knowledge of South Africa’s recent history. In contrast, what happened at Sharpeville is planted in the consciousness of people who were not even born at the time and who have never been anywhere near modern Gauteng, as much of former Transvaal is now known.

What happened outside Sharpeville police station on March 21st, 1960 is a story easily enough told. A detachment of about 140 police officers, supported by Saracen armoured vehicles, opened fire on a demonstration, numbering an estimated 20,000 people, protesting against the apartheid regime’s pass laws, which restricted the movements of black South Africans. Sixty-nine people, including 18 women and children, were killed and more than 130 wounded.

The authorities made the predictable and standard attempts at retrospective justification, claiming that the police were fired on first. One demonstrator probably did fire some shots. The police were undoubtedly fearful since nine of their colleagues had been butchered in a riot near Durban a few weeks previously. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission revisited the massacre at Sharpeville in 1998 little that was new emerged in relation to the facts.

Tom Lodge's Sharpevilledoes not purport to contain new information on what happened either. The author, a senior academic at the University of Limerick, sets out to determine the significance of the massacre in the context of South Africa's evolution to multiracial democracy. What were the consequences of the killings? How did the event influence the thinking of those driving towards the dismantling of the regime? What impact did it have on the white-minority administration? How did it influence world opinion and the international campaign against apartheid?

Historians and political scientists have differing views. An early analysis quoted by the author identified Sharpeville as the point at which many white South Africans began to question the system for the first time while beginning also to understand that the economy could not function without a large black working class in the urban areas.

Other analysts later saw Sharpeville as driving the Verwoerd government towards the establishment of bantustans, the so-called tribal homelands, thus altering the economic framework of South Africa. Many of the pan-Africanists, such as Joe Slovo, the communist theoretician, saw the massacre as a “watershed”, a “strategic turning point” in the struggle against the regime. Others have described Sharpeville as the point at which liberalism and reformism died in South Africa, making armed resistance the inevitable path to the future.

Whichever interpretation one may prefer, it is certain that Sharpeville did not mark the start of a decline in South Africa’s economic strength. While a rise in white emigration followed, this was to be dramatically reversed as the economy grew through the 1960s and 1970s. Industrial expansion exceeded 7 per cent per annum. Between 1960 and 1970 the white population grew from about 3.1 million to almost 3.9 million, and by 1980 it was 4.5 million. Whatever Sharpeville signalled, it was not the failure of the South African economic model.

Nor did Sharpeville indicate the apartheid state’s diminished capacity to contain insurrection. As Lodge phrases it, South Africa became “progressively militarised” after Sharpeville. Police numbers grew exponentially. Equipment was improved. The armed forces were expanded. By the end of the 1960s the South African arms industry was the 10th-biggest in the world, producing state-of-the art automatic weapons and even its own jet fighter aircraft.

The reality was that the apartheid system was brought down not solely by any one event or policy choice within South Africa itself but by a convergence of many factors, some indeed internal and others of an international nature.

A valuable aspect of this narrative is Lodge’s account of the internationalisation of the apartheid issue after Sharpeville. Apartheid became, as he describes it, a “global preoccupation”, and the international anti-apartheid movement “became one of the most influential post-war social movements”. He links its growth across Europe and North America to the arrival of a “diaspora of socially assertive South African exiles” at a time when the “politics of conscience” had begun to gain purchase in these societies. Liberal western news media, with a few exceptions, maintained a critical focus on South Africa.

There is an informative and extended chapter on the anti-apartheid movement, with some emphasis on Ireland’s considerable contribution. Unhappily, the book is diminished by quite a few misprints. At one point the narrative falls into nonsense, referring to an Irish cabinet minister called “Conor Trachtaa”, who is stated to have promised the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement that there would be no more trade missions to South Africa.

Conor Brady is a commissioner with the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission. He was editor of The Irish Timesfrom 1986 to 2002