Lessons from Soweto
DeNeen Brown contrasts the pupil protests that defied apartheid and left hundreds of children dead, with US anti-gun walkouts after the Florida school shooting
HECTOR Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy, was one of the first pupils to die.
On June 16, 1976, more than 10000 black high school pupils in Soweto marched out of school, protesting against an apartheid government mandate that they study in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors.
Defying a law that banned “liberation protests”, the pupils marched to a sports stadium, singing songs and waving signs that read, “Afrikaans must be abolished”.
Last week, tens of thousands of high-school pupils across the US walked out of class to protest against gun violence in the aftermath of the school massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But while some pupils who participated in the protest defied school officials, none of them risked their lives.
In Soweto, defiance came at a terrible cost.
Police confronted the pupils, ordered them to disperse, then threw tear gas. Suddenly, police opened fire on thousands of unarmed pupils.
The photo of a teenager carrying Hector’s limp body as Hector’s sister ran beside him, screaming in agony would ricochet across the world, changing the course of history and leading to the end of apartheid.
But the uprising, which spread across the country, also left more than 566 pupils dead and thousands more injured.
The Soweto protest began at about 7am, when pupils filed out of Naledi High School. They marched along Soweto’s streets, picking up more protesters as they passed other high schools.
“While they were still waiting there for the pupils to come out, one of the pupils came running and said, ‘Police are coming in a big convoy. Watch out.’ He was warning the other pupils,” Sam Nzima, who captured the famous photo of Hector, would later testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Human Rights Violations in 1996.
Nzima, who was working for The World newspaper, recalled that police arrived in a convoy of seven vans and a “hippo”, an armed military vehicle.
Nzima saw a white police officer in uniform carrying a stick tucked under his arm. The officer warned the pupils to disperse immediately. The pupils started to sing,
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, meaning “God Bless Africa”. The officer issued a second warning, giving the pupils three minutes to leave. The pupils continued singing in defiance.
“And it was hardly three minutes when he pulled out his firearm, and he shot directly at the pupils,” Nzima testified.
“Now, all hell broke loose. All these policemen were shooting at the pupils randomly.”
Nzima saw one pupil fall, and another pick him up.
“I rushed there to take a picture,” Nzima testified. “I took six sequence shots of that picture of that student, whom we later discovered was Hector Pieterson.”
The teenager who carried Hector was Umbiswe Makuba, (sometimes spelled Mbuyisa Makhubo). He was then 18, and did not know Hector, but instinctively picked up the child to get help. The girl in the photo screaming with her hand raised as if to ward off any more bullets was Hector’s sister, Antoinette, who was then 17.
The photo shows Makuba, in overalls, running with Hector. Blood is coming out of Hector’s mouth. Hector is missing his left shoe.
“After taking those pictures,” Nzima testified, “I helped Antoinette and Umbiswa Makuba put Hector Pieterson in the press car to be taken to the Pafene clinic, where he was certified dead by the doctor.
“On this afternoon,” Nzima testified, “Soweto was on fire.”
Antoinette Sitole, the sister of Hector Pieterson, told the commission in 1996 that she remembered seeing Hector standing in front of a school as police fired.
“While we were standing outside, there was someone coming in front of the school, and who is this person. And I thought this is Hector. I called Hector,” Sitole testified. “I said to Hector he should not be there, and we (should) go back home.” Then she heard gunshots. “There was tear gas, and there was confusion. I saw people hiding themselves and then I hid myself, too,” Sitole said. “I was afraid because I didn’t know where Hector had gone, and people were holding something. And then I moved forward and I could not see properly, and I saw Hector’s shoe.”
She ran beside Makuba. She remembered asking him where he was going with her brother. She remembered Makuba saying there was a clinic nearby.
“While we were running, someone stopped in front of us, this car,” Sitole testified. They put Hector in the car.
“When we arrived at the clinic, we found a doctor there,” Sitole testified. “When the doctor went on, he said there is nothing I can do. He asked me the names, who I am. After that, I stayed there in the clinic without knowing what to do.”
It was 10.30, only three hours after the beginning of the Soweto student uprising.
Sitole told the commission that the teenager who carried Hector was harassed by police.
“Mbuyiswa decided to go into exile,” Sitole testified. “He has not been seen or heard from since he wrote a letter to his mother from Nigeria in 1978.”
The photo of Hector Pieterson was published in newspapers worldwide. Nzima lost his job and was forced to go into hiding in the Eastern Transvaal. He said he was never paid by The World newspaper for the photograph.
“I was frustrated, I couldn’t be a journalist any more,” he said. “Because had I stuck to journalism, I was going to be shot or locked up in jail.”
The government would later conclude Hector “was killed by a shot fired directly at him and not by a bullet ‘ricocheting off the ground’ as police claimed,” according to a South African History Timeline report.
Twenty-six years after the Soweto uprising, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum opened in Soweto on a street not far from where the 12-year-old pupil’s death sparked a revolution.
The words on the memorial read: “To Honour the Youth who Gave Their Lives in the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy.” – The Washington Post