The true legacy of Soweto ’76 -- and some of its abiding myths

Neither education nor activism would be the same after the uprising, writes Jonathan Jansen

WHEN a comrade burst into the large science lecture hall of the University of the Western Cape in June 1976 and stated: “We are declaring solidarity with the students in Soweto”, my first thought as a young undergraduate student was: “Where on earth is Soweto?”

Nobody asks that question today, for the landmark events of June 16 that year gave the township an enduring place in the memory of South Africans and the world.

With the passage of time, so many myths have come to memorialise Soweto 1976.

It was not a protest against Afrikaans. Afrikaans was already part of the curriculum. It was the extension of the oppressor’s language to more school subjects that became the repressive straw that broke the struggling camel’s back.

It was not a movement started by the ANC; Soweto was really a product of the Black Consciousness Movement and its organisations, the South African Students’ Organisation in particular, which mobilised a passionate student movement. If anything, the Soweto uprising caught the ANC off-guard after a long period of relative calm following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.

It was not, in the days following, a Soweto event, for the uprising spread quickly to all other parts of South Africa, from Atteridgeville in Pretoria to Athlone in Cape Town, so that what started as a revolt by high school pupils brought to the streets university students and workers from all sectors.

And it was not, ultimately, a struggle against education but against the entire apartheid system that subjected black people to political oppression and economic exploitation.

What the Soweto uprising did was bring a generation of youth out of political slumber onto the streets, with the usual generational disputes among old and new activists and an unprecedented clampdown by a brutal state machinery.

One of the central questions at stake in long debates among comradely groups was the role of education in struggle. Should education be abandoned, or at least sidelined, in the broader struggle for liberation? Or was alternative education the instrument required to conscientise and mobilise youth for the very goal of human freedom?

As a student then, I was drawn into the turbulence of those times and, whether you planned to or not, you were affected by the constant pursuit of student activists, the disruption of classes and the torture and killings of relatives and neighbours, people you knew. Slowly but surely my political consciousness was being formed as I listened to firebrands on campus like the young theology graduate Allan Boesak. In community halls, Charles Villa-Vicencio and Farid Esack made the links for you between personal misery and structural oppression. In a college hall I listened attentively to the struggle poetry of James Matthews and the literary works of Richard Rive as they connected the dots between theory and experience.

Things started to become clearer and you began to dream about the possibility of a democracy where the epidermis did not determine the scope of your ambitions.

Between 1976 and 1980, the student protests continued unabated and all kinds of state “reforms” (and I use that word dismissively) in labour, education and politics failed to stem the tide of activism.

During this time I became a high school biology teacher in Vredenburg and District Six and was stunned by the courage and clarity of the struggle among young people. You could die for taking a stand for justice and yet the striking thing about the struggle then was that the violence came not from the youth but from the state machinery.

Protests, for the most part, were peaceful and persistent — in part, I suspect, because the most prominent leaders were largely pastors and priests for whom nonviolence was a critical part of their commitments.

What was the legacy of Soweto 1976? The first and most important consequence was the reawakening of activism that has changed student political culture to this day. There is an awareness of the power of the student voice and the significance of student movements. The events of 1976 no doubt hastened the path to democracy.

Less positive was the framing of Afrikaans as a language of the oppressor. It is difficult to make the valid argument today that Afrikaans has a broader and more inclusive history than one of oppression that sits on the tongue of a white speaker. The arrogance of the regime damned Afrikaans in perpetuity. Pro-Afrikaans activists, for whom any sign of the demise of the language represents an existential crisis, simply cannot or will not understand that the imposition of Afrikaans on resisting communities brought about its own demise.

And then, of course, good public school education was never repaired despite several attempts to “restore the culture of teaching and learning”, the title of one of Nelson Mandela’s post-1994 education initiatives. Teachers were never again regarded with the kind of awe and afforded the respect that marked earlier periods in our education history. Schools were no longer treasured as places of learning.

Yet none of the struggles today should detract from the significance of Soweto 1976 when it comes to the freedoms we enjoy as a result of the sacrifices of so many young South Africans.

Jansen is the outgoing vicechancellor and rector of Free State University. He will take up a fellowship at Stanford University in the US later this year

The first and most important consequence was the reawakening of activism that has changed student political culture to this day