Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Those brave acts of protest sent reverberations around the world
my home town.
Because of June 16 and the Soweto uprising, I think I knew the name “Soweto” before I knew “Johannesburg”.
To be fair, much of that Soweto education came from pop culture.
When Lauryn Hill sang “Why black people always be the ones to settle/ March through these streets like Soweto”, I heard her lyrics from my car seat on the way home from nursery school.
The same movement that propelled the Soweto uprising was the movement whose ideas underpinned much of the history curriculum I studied.
For example, my high school consulted radical historian and Guyanese activist Walter Rodney when they created their social studies curriculum, according to history teacher Annie Johnston.
Berkeley High School also has the US’s only African American studies department at high school level.
“In most classes, to teach Black Consciousness in a regular high school causes a discomfort among many,” said Naomi Washington-Diouf, the head of the department.
“Black people or allies speaking their truth are seen as a sign of revolt and thus, to prevent this, Black Consciousness classes are discouraged, except in Afro- centric schools and African American studies departments.”
However, Washington-Diouf said pupils in her classes did not remember apartheid being taught or South Africa being mentioned more than once or twice.
But because Black Consciousness is fostered at Berkeley High, the approach to history and the present shifts.
“We had to make more room in the curriculum for the nonUS perspective and look at the history of the sub- regions within Africa, not just ‘Then Americans went and did this and this’,” said Johnston, who taught at Berkeley High School for 22 years.
“What we were able to do, especially given our classrooms that had a large numbers of black students, is figure out how to connect history to the experiences of children in our classroom by drawing parallels – and looking at segregation in the US and during apartheid.”
Johnston said the community connections to Black Consciousness in Oakland and Berkeley “definitely contribute” to the dedication that the teachers have to teaching “alternative” history.
“Being from Berkeley is not the same as being American. We examine America’s covert mercenary- type operations within southern Africa, being fronted from the Congo to Namibia to Zimbabwe and we see that then, South Africa was a key ally that was very problematic – similar to our current ally, Israel.
“If you’re just looking at history through the Eurocentric lens like the rest of America, then you’re going to understand South Africa in a very different context.”
I am a white American who has been in South Africa for less than three months. I cannot speak for all Americans. I cannot speak with experience about South Africa.
Black Consciousness is not my movement.
But as I approach Youth Day, and I think back to what I learnt in American classrooms and the time I have spent reporting in Soweto, I am overwhelmingly grateful to the young black South African revolutionaries who fought for a better education in 1976 and those who continue the fight today.
The Black Consciousness movement is a global one and when those students marched out of the classrooms 40 years ago, they sent reverberations around the world.
I wish all Americans could have had the education I did, and that my education could have been more comprehensive when it came to what occurred in Soweto on June 16, 1976.
But I know what I learnt was improved considerably because the actions in Soweto 40 years ago connected the Struggle to the actions in my home town 50 years ago and today.
For that I am grateful to the Class of 76.