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Period: to
Sharpeville uprising
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The March
South African police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in the black township of Sharpeville near Johannesburg. The demonstrators were protesting the establishment of apartheid pass laws which restricted movement of non-whites.
In Sharpeville itself, 69 were killed and 176 wounded when police fired on the crowd, 63 of them shot in the back. In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, protests broke out in Cape Town and elsewhere, and there were further casualties. Overall, 13,000 were jailed