In search of Onkgo

The charismatic teacher helped to seed the ground for the 1976 Soweto protests, but was brutally killed by a parcel bomb

There is no comprehensive monograph on the life of student activist Onkgopotse Abram Tiro. Despite Tiro being one of the progenitors of the Black Consciousness Movement and a peer of Steve Biko, few photographs of him exist. As someone who gained “notoriety” prior to the advent of television in this country, film footage of him is also nonexistent. Yet Tiro’s role in conscientising the youths who would lead the Soweto revolts of June 1976 was, in a word, monumental.

A South African Students’ Organisation (Saso) member based at Turfloop University, Tiro came to prominence when he was expelled after a rousing anti-Bantu education speech during a graduation ceremony, sparking nationwide protests.

He was later recruited for a job teaching history at the Morris Isaacson High School in Orlando West, Soweto, from which leaders such as Tsietsi Mashinini emerged.

In 1973, Tiro left South Africa for Botswana and, once there, forged links with international movements such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He continued his underground work for organisations such as the South African Student Movement (SASM), Saso and the Black People’s Convention (BPC).

A year later, he was killed by a parcel bomb. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty hearings, nobody came forward to claim responsibility for his murder.

A Blues for Tiro, a Steve Mokwena film made a decade ago to mark the 30th anniversary of the June 1976 uprising, is an enigmatic record that does not try to keep his memory alive per se, but rather speculates about what he would think of our “freedom”.

“I first heard of Tiro in 1985,” says Mokwena. “I was a pupil at Seana Marena Secondary School in Mapetla [in Soweto]. I was in the SRC [student representative council] as well. I remember being counselled by the principal, Bra Steve Monyomeratwe. He said: ‘The things you went through, we went through before,’ and he told me the story of this teacher he taught with at Morris Isaacson.”

That teacher was Tiro.

Mokwena says “the magic” of Morris Isaacson lay in the staff recruitment strategy of Ntate Lekgau Mathabathe, who was the school principal at the time Tiro was expelled from Turfloop in the early 1970s.

According to academic and historian Steve Lebelo, Mathabathe’s strategy — which yielded Tiro and, possibly, other firebrands — exposed a weakness in the apartheid regime’s controls that let charismatic organisers such as Tiro slip in through the cracks.

“Teachers were chosen by school committees and school boards. School committees tended to be communallybased structures. This is where the apartheid state realised that it made a grave mistake because it allowed that space to be controlled by the community, untampered with,” says Lebelo.

“In 1977, the state takes over the schools and determines who teaches where. If you think about it, that was a reaction to Tiro.”

Tiro’s stint at Morris Isaacson may not have lasted more than six months, but it was time well spent.