Apartheid reparations litigation turns on the money

Sixty-six years after the Sharpeville massacre, the money has become the driving force behind a new wave of litigation, as survivors and victims’ families ask South Africa’s courts to put a price on apartheid’s crimes and finally deliver reparations decades after the fact.

At the center of the case is a potential class action lawsuit signed onto by survivors and the families of those killed. At least 69 people were shot by police on March 21, 1960, during a demonstration against the country’s pass laws, which restricted Black people’s movements and where they could live and work. The claimants hope the case could lead to reparations, but the path to any payout runs through a legal obstacle first: an apartheid-era statute that continues to block efforts to seek redress and remains in force decades after apartheid ended and a Black-majority government took power.

In September, the group’s lawyers filed an application in the Gauteng High Court challenging the continued existence of the Indemnity Act 61 of 1961. The financial logic is straightforward. If the court finds the law unconstitutional and also certifies a class action for survivors and dependants of those killed, claims for individual damages could follow. For claimants like Paulina Mathinye, whose father was among those shot when she was five years old, the prospective damages carry concrete economic weight. Without her father, the family’s main breadwinner, she could not finish school, a loss she says cascaded into the lives of her children and grandchildren. “So we struggled a lot. And we are still struggling now, because nothing has been happening,” she told NPR. If the case succeeds, she says she would use any reparations to fix up her modest home and pay for her four grandchildren’s educations.

Meanwhile, the Sharpeville litigation sits within a broader legal campaign seeking truth, accountability and reparations for apartheid-era crimes before it is too late. “It’s crucial that these issues of deep injustice are properly dealt with and that South Africa confronts them and does not sweep them under the carpet,” said Daniel Leader, an international human rights lawyer advising the South African legal team representing the Sharpeville survivors and families.

Other cases are moving in parallel. A court ruling last year found that South Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Chief Albert Luthuli, the former leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s party, was beaten to death by apartheid police in 1967, overturning an earlier inquest finding that he died after being struck by a train. The inquest into the 1985 killings of four anti-apartheid activists known as the Cradock Four, abducted and killed by apartheid security forces near the Eastern Cape town of Cradock, has been reopened; although the officers involved are all dead, the victims’ families hope it will establish who ordered the killings. The inquest into the torture and death of Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who died in police detention in 1977, has also returned to court. “It’s very clear that the murder of Steve Biko was exactly that, murder,” Biko’s son Nkosinathi told media in September at the reopened inquest. “We hope that this inquest will eventually get to this very certain, unambiguous finding.” The original 1977 inquest heard security branch members say Biko had fallen and hit his head in a scuffle with security police. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the court-like restorative justice body set up in the 1990s, later re-examined the case and denied amnesty to the security officers who testified, saying they had not been truthful, essentially clearing the way for possible prosecutions that never happened.

That failure to prosecute is itself now under formal scrutiny. Hundreds of the TRC’s recommendations for prosecutions were delayed or never pursued, and last year President Cyril Ramaphosa established a formal inquiry to investigate whether the recommendations were deliberately shelved. The inquiry is examining whether there was a secret deal between the old leaders of the apartheid regime and the country’s new Black leaders not to prosecute cases in the interests of reconciliation. Its findings are due in December, and its conclusions could shape the legal and financial terrain on which claims like Sharpeville’s proceed.

For the claimants, the stakes are both historical and material. Back at the Sharpeville cemetery, where rows of graves sit overrun with weeds and garbage in a visibly poor township about an hour’s drive from Johannesburg, Mathinye notes that the graveyard is spotless only once a year, when South Africa’s political elite descend to commemorate the massacre on the public holiday known as Human Rights Day. “Why are they dirty? It’s a disgrace,” she says. “I’m still angry. My anger comes out because that’s the day my father was shot.” She argues her father’s part in what became a turning point in the struggle against apartheid has not been sufficiently recognized by the current democratic government, and she wants justice, however delayed. As Vincent Thamae of the NGO Voices of Sharpeville, which works with survivors and descendants, put it as the group paused before a memorial plaque: “We ask of those who are sleeping here to be with us as we pursue justice for them.” More background on the story is available at https://www.npr.org/2026/10/17/nx-s1-5987671/south-africa-justice-sharpeville-apartheid.