r/historyvideos

On March 28, 1994, just weeks before South Africa’s historic first democratic election, the streets of Johannesburg turned into a warzone. This is the raw archival history of the Shell House Massacre—and the controversial defensive order given by Nelson Mandela that shook the nation.

As thousands of Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) supporters marched through the CBD, tensions reached a boiling point outside Shell House, the national headquarters of the African National Congress (ANC). Fearing an imminent and fatal assault on the ANC leadership inside, Nelson Mandela took matters into his own hands, issuing a direct command to his internal security team: protect the building, "even if you have to kill people."

What followed was a tragedy that left 19 people dead and hundreds injured, forever staining the road to democracy. While the ANC maintained they acted strictly in self-defense, the subsequent Nugent Commission of Inquiry concluded that the lethal force used against the marchers was ultimately unjustified.

Between 1984 and 1989, the apartheid state plunged South Africa into an extended and progressively brutal State of Emergency in a desperate attempt to crush a wave of insurrection that had erupted in response to the introduction of the tricameral constitution, which entrenched Black political exclusion, and the explosive growth of the United Democratic Front and allied community organisations. A partial emergency, first declared in July 1985 in the most volatile townships of the Eastern Cape and the PWV (Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging) triangle, was followed in June 1986 by the imposition of a nationwide State of Emergency that would be renewed annually until 1990, vesting the security forces—the South African Police, the South African Defence Force, and the newly empowered municipal police and kitskonstabels (instant constables)—with sweeping, virtually unchallengeable powers. Under the emergency regulations, indefinite detention without trial became the norm, with over 30,000 people, some as young as eleven, being thrown into prison, where torture, suffocation, electric shocks, and severe beatings were routine; the state banned all unauthorised public gatherings, imposed suffocating dusk-to-dawn curfews, and cloaked townships in an information blackout by forbidding press reporting on unrest, the security forces’ actions, and the very existence of the detentions. Troops in Casspir armoured vehicles and police in yellow Hippos saturated the townships, raiding houses at night, sealing off entire neighbourhoods, and turning schools into garrison posts, while the deployment of teargas became a relentless, everyday reality—cannisters fired into funeral processions, church services and even into people’s kitchens—designed to break the spirit of defiance. A particularly sinister feature of the emergency was the state’s clandestine sponsorship of vigilante groups, such as the witdoeke (white headbands) in Crossroads, who were armed and directed to unleash terror against comrades and community activists, resulting in massacres and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands. Although the sheer scale of state violence eventually fractured the township uprising, the emergency exposed the regime’s moral vacuum to the world, provoked tightened international sanctions and disinvestment, and deepened the internal crisis to a point where the government’s own security establishment began to acknowledge that military repression alone could not sustain white minority rule—a realisation that would compel the regime, by late 1989, to begin the unbanning of the liberation movements and the halting, reluctant march towards negotiations.