Recalling the Soweto Uprising
South Africans commemorate June 16, 1976
SOWETO, SOUTH AFRICA — There were many dark days before the long battle to end white-minority rule concluded in the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black president in 1994.
One of the darkest was a sunny winter’s day — June 16, 1976 — when police unleashed their dogs and set them upon schoolchildren protesting the forced introduction in black schools of Afrikaans as an equal language of instruction with English. Among the first to be shot and killed was 13-year-old Hector Pieterson. A photograph of Pieterson being carried by another schoolboy as Pieterson’s distraught sister, Antoinette, ran alongside them became the iconic image of the Soweto Uprising and a focus for international attention and anger over the brutal behaviour of the Afrikaner-led authorities toward the black majority.
More than 400 blacks were killed in the next few days in violence across the country that was triggered by what had happened in Soweto. The tragedy was commemorated this Sunday as it is every year on what is called Youth Day with an exuberant march by thousands of teenagers through the neighbourhood where Pieterson was shot dead only a few metres from where the Mandela family lived.
“Pieterson is very special to me because he lost his life fighting for our freedom so that we can walk on any street in our country at any time,” said 15-year-old (Alice) Muthumuni Maimela, who came to the event with three classmates from a school for gifted children in the notoriously impoverished, crime-ridden black township of Diepsloot where many of the 150,000 people live in shacks without running water.
“I have thought about this a lot and I don’t think that I would have had the strength to do this myself. It takes a special character to take part in such protests.”
Her friend, Dilelo (Rachel) Moremi, added: “Most of us are only concerned with living our lives. We do not think of others and how we could help make everyone’s life better.”
As drummers drummed, dancers danced and others sang resistance songs from the apartheid era, another of the students, Cornelia Nkosi condemned the party-like atmosphere that surrounded them. “People died on this day. That is what we should be remembering,” she said. “They must not be forgotten.”
The schoolgirls had devoted a lot of time to learning about the student “martyrs” of the anti-apartheid struggle, they said. To prove it they rhymed off the names of many activists such as Steve Biko, who died in police custody in 1977 of head injuries suffered during repeated beatings.
With Mandela, or Madiba as he is usually called here, still in serious condition eight days after being admitted to hospital with a recurrent lung infection, the ailing 94-year-old Father of South Africa was on many people’s minds Sunday and his portrait was carried by some children taking part in the march in Soweto. Although he led the African National Congress to power after being released after 27 years in prison, Mandela has always had a much more exalted status here than that of a politician. Because he is regarded as a revolutionary and as the Father of the Nation, banners with his image are a given at almost every public gathering from school openings to rugby matches.
But there was open resentment Sunday at how the memory of the Soweto Uprising had been hijacked by lesser politicians and their supporters. Wearing party colours, they were out in force Sunday giving highly political speeches that had nothing to do with Hector Pieterson or the cause that he and so many others died for.
“The whole idea of remembering what happened here in 1976 has been diverted by politicians who use this day for their own purposes,” said 30-year-old accountant Moses Gadebe. “I have not heard any of them speak about those who died here.”
As Gadebe spoke, Trevor Ngwane of the Democratic Left Front, grabbed a loudspeaker to denounce the ruling ANC as “billionaires and millionaires.”
But the main microphones at the Hector Pieterson Museum were controlled by representatives of the ANC. Speaking a two-minute walk away from where Pieterson was killed, they spoke of little else except their alleged accomplishments over the past few years.