The Sharpville Six
By Prakash Diar
McClelland & Stewart
In 1988, the South African Supreme Court turned down a last-ditch petition to reopen the case of six young Black workers convicted of murdering a town councilor in an ugly mob scene. Pictures of the Six’s families awaiting the State President’s word on mercy or death were televised across the world. They were a confused lot, mostly women and some of them bare-footed, who shifted their gazes between the ground and the void to which their eyes mechanically returned.
Now some years later, and with the knowledge that the death sentences were commuted, one of the lawyers for the defence tenders his record of the trial with the modest addition of sociological and legal background.
The Six, one woman and five men, were the first Blacks to be tried and convicted for murder under the law of “common purpose,” which allowed a judge to assign guilt for collective actions to any individual found to be a participant in mob violence. An initially peaceful procession on the municipal offices with the aim of protesting rent hikes was broken up by the police, and some of those in attendance regrouped at the house of a councilor to take their anger out on him as the main proponent of raised rents. One thing led to another, and around one hundred people stones and burned the house, then captured the fleeing councilman and set him aflame by the side of the road.
None of the eight people originally accused was pinpointed by the prosecution as a direct perpetrator of the murder.
The author, Prakash Diar, represented the accused at the trial and during the circuitous appeals as an “advising attorney,” meaning that it was his task to prepare them for the trial, and provide updates on the status of the case. Given the opportunity for close observation of his clients, Diar merges a biographical approach to the defendants’ plight with the reporting of the fact of the case as it unfolds. Some of the psychological observations he contributes are truly striking, although the vignettes for the lesser characters are too sketchy to merit more than a passing notice.
In particular, the book benefits from Diar’s resolve to let his clients speak in their own voice. “Even today,” says one of his interlocutors, “after so long, nothing has changed. When the door behind me closes, I become sad.” In the maximum security prison, where the Six are confined for over three years pending execution, it is habitual for the wardens to have the inmates shut the door on themselves when they are returned to their cells. This is what Diar’s client has to say on the practice: “It is an automatic door. When you close it, it locks from the outside. It was not nice doing this, you do not want to close that door, you know you do not belong here, but you must do it.”
Diar’s exposé focuses on the most salient facts of the trial, and therefore it does not reproduce the entire court record. But when it falls back to quoting the record, there is much for the reader to notice. For example, the judge’s and the prosecutor’s documents substitute numbers for the names of the accused.
As an even more tangible sign of the South African legal system’s fixation with numerals, we are told that the accused sat behind numbered cards which served to identify them at the trial. The defence moved that the cards be removed from the courtroom, because some of the witnesses might rely on them in singling out the person implicated in their testimonies. In fact, if anything is to be said about Diar’s fast-moving presentation of the trial, it is that he is enticed too much by the task of breaking the serial logic of the prosecution, as in the above instance, and consequently tries to follow through the case of each of his clients with the same amount of detail. As a result, the reader at times has to juggle a host of names, not only of the accused, but also of the witnesses.
Interestingly, there is a sense of real resistance against the grid of social and racial divisions that emanates precisely from the variation of names. At any rate, the defence could use the fact that almost every defendant bore a private adopted name to its advantage, smashing the testimony of two false witnesses.
In terms of his analysis of the legal aspects of the case, Diar fosters the desire to remain on the descriptive side. What criticism he offers is mainly directed at persona and not the legal institutions as such.
Torn between his defence towards the legal system, which, says he, “all of my training has taught me to respect,” and his conviction that the state prosecution had committed perjury, Diar does not allow the reader to gain a good grasp of the smooth surface of the apartheid system of justice.
In the Sept. 25, 1958 issue of The Times (London), Erwin Griswold wrote that “South Africa has long had excellent Courts, maintaining high standards of fairness and justice.” But, he added, “however fair and competent a court may be, if the underlying legal situation is deeply unsound, a court may, simply because it must act according to law, be compelled to unsound results.”
Diar’s book amply refutes the first statement, the one about the integrity of the courts, but does not really touch upon the questions of the underlying legal situation. “I am aware,” Diar writes, “that appointments to the bench are political in many civilized countries, but in most of them the party in power represents the majority of the people.” This clearly cannot be accepted as the whole picture.
Diar does hint at the demise of a legal system which, like the South African, operates without supporting values and concern in those called upon to administer justice. That is, even if some safeguards can be said to exist against internal abuse, the practices are just not in place to make these remedies anything more than formal.
But that is all on the negative side. The Sharpville Six is a book, a great book, about the lives lived in a state of constant mobilization, and a promise, a great promise, about the possibility of finding an interface between all levels of politics, local and international, and everything in between. As such, it is of interest to all those wishing to make a career in human rights advocacy, and in general anyone who wants to gain a powerful glimpse into the South African situation.
