Media technology had a vital and changing role in the struggle against apartheid. During the Sharpeville shooting, a newsreel stringer raced to the township. He seems to have shot no more than one roll of film, 100 feet, two and a half minutes, of which only about 65 feet are extant. Arriving at the mopping up stage, the few images he shot are devastating. Dead women and men are sprawled in their own blood; a dazed and wounded man sits on the ground, unable to get up. A body is being lifted into a truck; a group of four black men are carrying a corpse in a sheet, under the supervision of a policeman with a sjambok, a giant whip. These were images that constituted irrefutable evidence of the lethal nature of South African racism, and they became part of the anti-apartheid propaganda arsenal for the next decades
