We dare not fail or falter
TOMORROW, 42 years ago, police opened fire on schoolchildren in Soweto. Among the first pupils to be shot dead were Hastings Ndlovu, 15, and Hector Pieterson, 13. Those shots that rang out on that fateful Wednesday morning were, in truth, the first shots of the revolution that would lead to the liberation of South Africa and the appointment of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first democratically elected president 18 years later.
It’s important, as we look back to that day in Orlando West 42 years later, to remember that the fire of the Struggle against the apartheid regime had been doused to embers. The parents of those pupils had been emasculated. The protests of the decade before, the pass law campaigns, had been ruthlessly crushed.
The official liberation movements had been shattered; their leaders exiled to faraway lands or jailed on Robben Island. This battle would be fought by the youth, some of whom were so young that they hadn’t even been born when Mandela and his Rivonia co-trialists was jailed.
The June 1976 battle initially wasn’t even against apartheid per se, but rather the insistence that black pupils be taught in Afrikaans to ensure they could be more efficiently used by Afrikaans overseers. The language of instruction was designed to enslave.
By the time the revolt had been declared officially suppressed a year later, the death toll that the apartheid regime would admit to would be 250, with an arc that spread across the Rand; from Soweto to Kagiso and Daveyton, from Alexandra to Mamelodi and then south to the Cape; where the youth would die in Grassy Park, Elsies River, Gugulethu and Nyanga. These are only the fatalities that are declared. We do not know of the others who perished as a direct result of wounds sustained in protest, nor of those beaten to death in police cells.
The leaders of the 1976 uprising would pay a very high price for their heroism. Many of them were thrust into adulthood too soon, chewed and spat out by the very people to whom they ran for succour. We owe the June 1976 generation an incalculable debt.
We must never ever discount the power of the youth again. In 1976, this country was shaken from its moribund malaise by the youth.
We have an opportunity to rewrite that narrative; we dare not fail, we dare not falter. Never again can the flower of our nation be shot down in the streets outside their homes for having the temerity to fight for what was right.