Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Decades of remembering
Nothing was quite the same in South Africa after the events of June 1976, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
PRESCIENT readers of the first edition of the Cape Argus on Wednesday, June 16, 1976, would have felt the punch of the smallest item on the page, a three-paragraph filler all but overwhelmed by the bigger stories of the day.
The lead story, from Europe, told of the Bonn government’s welcoming imminent talks in West Germany between Prime Minister BJ Vorster and US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Apartheid was beginning to register as an increasingly pressing international question.
The main front-page picture – with a story to go with it, under the liltingly alliterative headline, “Foreman finishes Frazier in the fifth” – was a ringside view of Smokin’ Joe’s defeat at the Nassau Coliseum in New York.
And, along with TV highlights – a novelty still and evidently worth a frontpage mention – was an intriguing story about the last moments of an air force Albatross that had plunged into the sea off the West Coast some weeks earlier.
But there was no mistaking the import of that three-paragraph filler, slipped into the paper at the last minute, as it was happening.
The headline said it all: “10 000 pupils riot in Soweto”.
By the time the later edition (reproduced here) hit the streets, Vorster, Kissinger and George Foreman had all been knocked off the page. Banner headlines told of the start of what would later become known as the Soweto uprising, an event whose scale would, within hours, dominate South African and even world news and irrevocably shift the politics of southern Africa.
The Argus editorial that day – obviously hastily written for the later Soweto editions – described as “a prophetic warning” the words of Leonard Mosala of the Soweto Urban Bantu Council only a day before that “very ugly scenes will come through our children, who are tired of being made to accept what they don’t like”.
And it wasn’t just the children, the country would learn.
In the months and years to follow, international isolation deepened, waves of young blacks went into exile to join the armed struggle and mass action at home intensified.
Back in 1976, though, the government was intent on toughing it out and restoring “order”. It tinkered, backing down, for instance, on the provocative directive that black school pupils be given half their tuition in subjects like mathematics and history, in Afrikaans – the bewildering ideological decree of 1974 that triggered the revolt two years later.
Yet, as PW Botha would discover through the 1980s, no amount of tinkering or trying to make oppression bearable would avert the mounting crisis or postpone events indefinitely.
The 10th anniversary of the uprising was a daunting commemoration: the Argus front page of June 16, 1986, is a bleak snapshot: a car bomb in Durban, violence across the country – “At least 22 dead over past four days – official” – a mass stayaway, draconian emergency regulations and a complete ban on unrest reporting.
Every snippet of news had to be cleared by the Bureau for Information in Pretoria. The Argus told readers in a prominent front-page “box”: “In terms of the state of emergency regulations, news, pictures and comment are restricted.”
For all that, despite the restrictions, the paper’s coverage left no doubt about the scale of the crisis.
Tangentially, there is a small item on the page that no one in 1986 would have perceived the fuller implications of: the baldly factual news brief from Washington said: “Four visiting Afghan rebel leaders have begun a five-day US visit to seek more and better weapons for their guerrilla war against Afghanistan’s Marxist government and a Soviet invasion force estimated at 115 000.” The Cold War was still the big thing, the consequences of surrogate militarism not yet imagined.
In domestic terms, there was not a hint that within less than four years the ANC would be unbanned and Nelson Mandela freed or that within less than eight years, the idea of revolution would fade as South Africa enjoyed heady celebrity status as the youngest – “miraculous” – entrant to the league of world democracies. The Struggle would be over and ordinary life, for want of a better term, would ensue.
The 20th anniversary of the Soweto uprising in 1996 seemed to match this ordinariness. There was no hoopla to speak of, with just a modest few Youth Day reports here and there, one of which quoted a Gauteng education official as saying most black and white pupils were virtually ignorant of the history of the uprising. “It’s not a black-white issue, it’s a youth-of-today issue,” she said.
The first mention of the anniversary in the Sunday Argus of June 16 is on page six, a short down-page story about a rally planned that day in Khayelitsha, to be addressed by among others the then-ANC provincial leader Chris Nissen. A day later, readers learnt, as the headline summed it up, “350 brave stormy weather for Youth Day rally”.
The big news that day – headline: “Sol, the ANC and Holomisa” – was about claims of dodgy dealings between casino king Sol Kerzner and the ruling party.
If the tenor of that report is grimly familiar, there’s a staggering detail in another report on the page which gives some idea of how, in one respect at least, society has changed since. It concerns technology and South Africa’s online access. By 1996, we learn, the number of people “connected to the Net” had risen to the grand sum of 285 000.
By 2006, nostalgia and a sense of our history still being very much with us in sometimes discomforting ways, comes to the fore in the renewed attention given to the defiance and courage of the 1970s.
Though the front page was dominated by a crash, crime and a quirky story about the world’s tallest man visiting the city, the June 16 edition devoted no fewer than three whole pages to the Soweto anniversary.
Every letter to the editor was about 1976, the headlines revealing the varying perspectives: “Y is for youth who gave their lives for our freedom”; “Remember June 16, but don’t glorify it” and “For most people these days it’s just another holiday”.
The editorial declared the “example” of the young people of 1976 “as one that can and should serve as an inspiration” at a time when the euphoria of the birth of democracy had “waned”.
There was a poignant article on the photographer Sam Nzima, whose image of the dead Hector Pieterson’s body being carried at a run by a fellow student, became an icon of the Struggle, but ended Nzima’s career in photojournalism when, fearing for his safety, he withdrew into obscurity.
The main opinion page article described the optimism of young people sealing bonds across old divides.
In 2016, there can be no denying the collective achievements of democratic constitutionalism forged by a society whose war with itself is vividly reflected in the events of the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet there is doubtless a greater sense of disillusionment and anger today than at any time since the optimistic days of the mid-1990s.
In a reflection on the meaning of the Soweto anniversary in 2001, Anglican priest Chris Chivers wrote that “while our contemporary focus is rightly on what we can do to build bridges across our divided community, we shall not achieve such reconciliation through collective amnesia”.
The point of remembering the sacrifices of 1976 “is to stir our resistance to contemporary evils and persistent forms of oppression within society”.
For some, these 40 years later, June 16, 1976 was the start of the revolution that never ran its course. For them – but not necessarily for them alone – the Struggle, as they might say, continues.