Spirit of Soweto ‘76 students lives on
JUNE 16, 1976, was the hallmark event of the black liberation movement in South Africa in the revolutionary gyration of the 1960s and 1970s that intensified decolonisation and freedom of all oppressed and colonised people.
It signified a turning point in the resistance to colonial apartheid, with tens of thousands of black youth refusing to accept the perversity of Bantu education and white minority rule.
Sadly and tellingly, most people in South Africa seem to have forgotten or been indoctrinated into forgetting by the neo-colonial South African regime that has consistently distanced itself from the demands of the youth, and the black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, that demanded an end to an inferior and under-funded public education system and the abolition of a white-oriented political, economic, and social system that was racist and exploitative at its core.
The hollow rhetoric of ANC politicians and spokespersons that generally commemorate June 16 as “Youth Day” reveals the superficial and pretentious nature of the South African regime, refusing to recognise that it was the historic 1976 Soweto insurrection led by the Soweto Students Representative Council, that was heavily influenced by the radical Black Consciousness Movement, particularly the South African Students Organisation (Saso) and the Black People’s Convention (BPC).
Though it was the black youth movement from the 1960s through the 1980s that hastened the dismantling of the apartheid machine, from 1990 through 1994, the ANC-led government continues to obscure and marginalise this historic watershed event and the aftermath that saw a thousand black students killed, many of their bodies dumped in unmarked locations outside Soweto, and thousands more forced to flee for their lives into exile in neighbouring countries and beyond.
Today, the spirit of Soweto of 1976 lingers in places like US-funded Israeli-occupied
Palestine and in the black liberation and indigenous land back movements in the US and in black communities resisting racial repression in Colombia and Brazil.
The Israeli military bombardment of Gaza over 11 days last month, resulted in 231 Palestinian deaths, including 65 children and 39 women, 1 212 injuries, of which 277 were children and 204 were women.
Further, 149 buildings, including six towers, brought the destruction toll of flattened homes to 449.
Such heavy bombardment by hundreds of bombs from fighter jets, including 122 bombs dropped in 25 minutes on May 18, on very densely populated civilian areas, constitute war crimes and collectively point to a systematic policy of the Israeli settler-colonial state of ethnic cleansing, tantamount to genocide.
Yet, the shocking amazing pictures that followed before, during, and after the military siege showed hundreds of youth continuing their resistance through non-violent protests against the eviction of indigenous Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan in East Jerusalem where 140 homes faced demolition by the occupation regime to make way for Israeli settlers.
East Jerusalem is 40% Palestinian, but Palestinians are forced to live in a tiny 15% space. Over 2 000 youth were arrested and detained by Israeli police and military personnel, yet in the spirit of Steve Biko’s instructive article in the defiant Black Consciousness Movement, of which the Soweto insurrection of 1976 was intrinsic, “Fear, an important determinant in politics,” Palestinian youth have broken the “fear barrier” of the Israeli state.
Palestinian lawyer Mohamud
Mahmoud told Al Jazeera: “Israeli forces are up against a people who no longer have anything to lose.”
The courage of resistance to the Israeli occupation is exemplified in young women defiantly beating on armed Israeli soldiers to stop them from bludgeoning other Palestinian youth brutalised by such soldiers, again kindling pictures of the heroic resistance of young women and men defying armed apartheid soldiers shooting randomly at residents in Soweto in June 1976.
On June 16, this year a 29-year-old woman, Mai Afaneh, from Abu Dis, was shot by Israeli occupation forces, and left to bleed away by the police.
In the US, the Black liberation movement like the Black Alliance for Peace, the Black August Organising Committee, All African People’s Revolutionary Party, the Uhuru Movement, and other organisations continue to wage a tireless struggle for justice for the black impoverished, many of whom languish in prisons for very long terms through unjust and punitive sentences and other millions who are confined to impoverished urban areas in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit and other cities, constantly resisting police brutality and law enforcement violence of the state.
A similar struggle as Soweto of 1976 is being waged in different quarters, even while the US government sheds crocodile tears for the assassinations of thousands of unarmed black women and men over the past 40 years, such as George Floyd and LaDonte Wright jr in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, during last and this year, a hypocrisy exposed by the recent killing of Shelly Hopkins, a 32-year old father of three in Minneapolis.
Monetary settlements to compensate the families of the slain people, while refusing to criminalise police brutality, are smokescreens that conceal the commodified value of black life, rooted in chattel slavery.
Similarly, black resistance continues in Latin America, especially in Cali, Colombia, against state repression funded by the US, resulting in scores dead and arrested by the regime.
In Brazil, a nation of 210 million, of which 54% are black, the black liberation movement continues to confront and resist racial oppression where 3000 people, mostly black, have been killed by police in São Paulo alone since January, this year.
The instructive and real lesson is that the oppressors can never give and never have given the oppressed their freedom.
Freedom can only be taken by the oppressed.
• This is a first of a two part series. Part 2 will be published tomorrow.
Kunnie is an internationallyrenowned educational activist and researcher involved with advancing the decolonisation struggles of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the world. He has taught and lectured at colleges and universities on all continents. His next book is The Mother Earth and the Collapse of the Capitalist System in the 21st century.