Soweto, 16 June 1976: June 16th Soweto Explodes & the Start of the End of Apartheid begins in my African Zion‘Freedom Is Coming, Tomorrow’
June 16, 1976: A student carries Hector Pieterson, with Pieterson's sister at his side.Iconic photograph shows boy killed by police in Soweto
On June 16 1976 Soweto students protested use of Afrikaans as the teaching medium in the Apartheid Education System
Police opened fire, killing 23 students and sparking off days of unrest.
It's the iconic image that grabbed the world's attention and helped change the course of South African history.
Fourty years ago , on June 16, 1976, thousands of black school children in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest the apartheid education system that obliged them to be taught in Afrikaans.
It was supposed to be a peaceful protest, but the students were met with police gunfire and at least 23 of them were killed.
One of the first youths to be killed was 12-year-old Hector Pieterson.
His death was captured in a photograph that came to define South Africa's liberation struggle.In the image a fellow student carries Hector, with his 17-year-old sister Antoinette Sithole at his side. For Sithole, the events of that day are still fresh in her memory.
The first thing that she spotted was my brother's shoes, so I quickly ran to the scene and joined them in running."The demonstration was meant for high school and secondary schools only, not the younger ones," Sithole said."But on the day, as we're protesting with pride, holding placards, singing and chanting, at some point we find younger ones.All of a sudden there was a shot. Everybody ran amok in confusion, running for cover, dashing into other people's homes. During that hide-and-seek I saw my younger brother on the opposite side of the pavement.There was another shot, so we had to go back into hiding and unfortunately we went two separate ways. When I came back to the pavement he was nowhere to be seen."
Then, Sithole saw a crowd of students gathered around a man who was carrying a child.
"The first thing that I spotted was my brother's shoes, so I quickly ran to the scene and joined them in running," she said."So we're running and I'm trying to explain myself: 'This is my brother, who are you? Where are you taking him?' The man never said anything."Then I saw blood coming from the side of the mouth and I panicked. My voice was harder -- 'who are you, can't you see my brother's head?' He never said anything, just keep running."
The shooting sparked off days of protests known as the Soweto uprisings, which many regard as the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime.
June 16 is now a National Holiday in South Africa, known as Youth Day. The Day Afrikaans stopped been used as the language of instruction. Today no school in Soweto offers Afrikaans as a subject. The subject of Afrikaans is not taught in any Indian or Black School and very, very few Coloured School and non in the Western Cape.
Now a guide at the Hector Pieterson memorial in Soweto, Sithole hopes to teach visitors about the sacrifices made there.
"Most people know our history, but don't fully know it," she said. "So they're coming here and we sort of embrace with them what really happened because they'll be seeing people like me, other people sharing the same story.
"It makes us proud and brave to talk about our history. And the very same history brought the World Cup today."
For Sithole, talking about the past isn't a burden, but rather a responsibility she feels compelled to take on."I sometimes feel like what happened to me was fate. Maybe I was left to keep on telling what happened on that day.At first, I just felt like it was a death like any other death -- why should people comment so much?I never really understood -- it took me years -- but now I'm proud standing here. Maybe it's like I'm a channel of the ancestors. I was left behind to tell the story."
The June 16 student uprising was such a turning point in South Africa’s history, few other days can now compare with it. In a way, it became the opening salvo in a sustained push to end decades of apartheid and political oppression. But it came at a great price.
Back in the early 1960s, after the Rivonia Triallists had been arrested, tried and then sentenced to long prison sentences, the ANC’s internal political structures had been ground down to virtually nothing, save for the increasingly fading memories of the defiance campaigns and spirited marches of the 1950s and early ‘60s. And the successes of the ANC’s military wing, MK, had had boiled down to modest pin pricks, largely along the Rhodesian border, as South Africa itself was still protected by acordon sanitaire of white or colonial rule that extended from Angola to Mozambique, clear across the region. To most, the National Party government’s rule over South Africa seemed almost unstoppable – and unlimited. (Such a seeming victory did, in the end, generate a fatal degree of hubris, of course.)
In April 1976, the government finally decided to enforce existing regulations that would ensure half the education of Africans – notably in tougher, specialised subjects like mathematics and the sciences – would henceforth take place in South Africa’s other official language, Afrikaans, rather than English. Most Soweto headmasters and teachers pledged not to carry out such an arbitrary diktat, even apart from the facts on the ground that there were virtually no such scientific or mathematic, bilingual African teachers available to do this.
Moreover, students generally had so little command of Afrikaans they would be doomed to educational failure, should such a decision become the reality of education in Soweto’s high schools. The imposition of this rule seemed precisely designed to destroy what little education was available under the harsh regimen of “Bantu Education” – thereby dashing any students’ hopes that they could achieve the education needed for success in the modern economy, rather than being condemned to the stoop-back, pick and shovel work apartheid’s masters obviously wanted for them.
Students began to organise their own opposition to this new regimen and scheduled a march to protest against this, heading out of Morris Isaacson and Orlando West High schools. But this peaceful (albeit boisterous) students’ march was met with real police muscle and well over a hundred, perhaps as many as two hundred, students were killed on that day, and many more were wounded.
Instead of the older Charterist ideals of the ANC, students at schools like Morris Isaacson High School had been increasingly affected by a new influence. Black Consciousness had exploded out of the segregated tertiary institutions like the University of the North and the University of Zululand. A growing number of Soweto’s younger, better-educated teachers were sympathetic to that intellectual movement or had been part of or strongly influenced by the concrete political expression of that ideology, the Black People’s Convention movement. They, in turn, inspired their high school charges with the idea that they must take charge of their own destinies and throw off the shackles of the racialised oppression now imposed on them.
As a young diplomat, this writer came into contact with this growing sense of frustration and idealism, right when he first arrived in South Africa in January 1975. Making friends with some of those teachers and school principals, he regularly visited their schools, met their students, and heard the arguments and complaints of teachers and students alike about their circumstances. One of his key tasks was to become attuned and knowledgeable about what was happening in reality in South Africa, rather than just imbibe that Panglossian fantasy put about by government hacks and apparatchiks.
And so, on one day, he had an appointment, set for June 16, to meet a teacher – a science master at one of the high schools – who had recently been on a sponsored, month-long visit to the US. The plan for the meeting was to review the trip to find out how things had gone. Did the visit meet the teacher’s expectations? Where there any difficulties administratively, or in terms of the people he had met, or the places he had wished to visit? This was routine stuff.
But, curiously, a few days before that scheduled meeting, the teacher had called to reschedule the appointment to a day or so earlier. The teacher apologised, but he explained that something else was now likely to come up on that day and he wouldn’t be free to talk over coffee or tea to review his trip. The appointment happened as planned.
Instead of sitting in the staff common room of that Soweto high school, on the evening of 16 June – just as initial censored reports were coming in on the radio and a bit more expansively in late editions of newspapers for sale on street corners (television was barely a presence yet) that Soweto had been the scene of a great march by students. There had been deadly force by police. As a result, the writer found himself at a kitchen table with a young surgeon from Soweto’s Baragwanath Hospital (well before the name Chris Hani had been appended to its entry sign).
As the surgeon slowly sipped a cup of coffee and spoke softly about his day, this doctor demonstrated what could only be described as that “thousand yard stare” – the one where someone is beyond tears from what has been witnessed. It is the face seen on soldiers who have experienced so much combat in such a concentrated time period they can no longer process their memories.
Instead of his usual routines of thoracic surgery and consultations with patients, the doctor had spent his afternoon in what had amounted to a field hospital, as the wounded were wheeled in with their grievous wounds from the police action against the students. Coping with the effects of police gun fire at the backs of the dozens of wounded who were wheeled into his operating theatre – they had been fired upon while fleeing the police line – had not been what he had signed up for in his life. He explained that he couldn’t be sure of the exact number – he had lost count – but there had been hundreds brought into the hospital that day. And he had dealt with so many of them.
Forty years later, it is clear that the Soweto Uprising marked an inflection point in South Africa’s history. By the time the police had restored a semblance of control, it gradually became clear nothing would be “as it was” again. Hundreds of students fled the country and their black consciousness ideology was gradually superseded by the impact of the ANC in exile around Africa and beyond. Others remained inside the country, but increasingly they would become members of the various elements of the UDF: they would call for “liberation before education”, and they would become the foot soldiers and leaders of many other groups dedicated to regime change of apartheid South Africa.
All of this came rushing back the other night when the writer attended a special commemoration of the 16th June uprising at the Market Theatre. This theatre itself had come into being at almost exactly the same date and it quickly became the home of what came to be termed, “struggle theatre”. Its first three productions were foreign classics: Chekhov’s The Seagull, Miller’s The Crucible and Weiss’s Marat/Sade. All three were designed to sharply challenge the existing order – the first to speak of the confusions of Russians in their nation’s ancien regime; the second to speak knowingly about racial prejudice and mob hysteria in early New England, and the third to speak of an insane asylum in France where the inmates take over the hospital as the actual staff is reduced to impotent observers when the patients re-stage the death of Marat, a prominent figure of the French Revolution.
In the same 40 years that eventually brought down the apartheid regime, the Market Theatre demonstrated the power of culture in prepping audiences to think anew. And in this special event on the theatre’s calendar, artistic director, James Ngcobo, together with writer Sandile Ngidi, choreographer Luyanda Sidiya and music director Tshepo Mngoma, brought to life ordinary people affected by the student uprising – ranging from the students who fought the police to the parents whose children had died at the hands of the police.
The full house brought together a deputation of today’s students from Morris Isaacson HS, hundreds of others who had actually lived through the events, along with yet others who had only heard about it from family tales or their school history books and whose primary visual referent may only be Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of Hector Pieterson’s lifeless body being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubu. For that, of course, is what the Soweto Uprising has become for many of South Africa’s youthful population – an historical event increasingly subsumed within a shopping and parties holiday called Youth Day, rather than anything speaking of students who took the direct action others may have shied away from back then.
Now, of course, the legacy of the Soweto Uprising has grown complicated. While the nation’s political system has, certainly, fundamentally changed, popular dissatisfaction with the circumstances of the present has generated a growing litany of “service delivery” protests, a new, angrier political party, the EFF, and a sense among many that the ANC has now lost its way by virtue of its corruption and hyper-patronage politics. Is there another profound upheaval in the wind?
A decade after the original Soweto Students Uprising, composer-dramatist Mbongeni Ngema had crafted a musical, Sarafina, on the events leading up to June 16. Naturally, it had premiered at the Market Theatre – and then it travelled abroad, becoming a long running hit in New York City, among many other stops. As the students come together for their march into history, they sing:
And If I don’t live to see the day,
You better believe it,
I’ll be there.
This is my home and I’m here to stay
Freedom is coming tomorrow,
Get ready, mama, prepare,
Freedom is coming tomorrow,
Get ready, mama, prepare….
Perhaps South Africans will march yet again in order to claim their full measure of freedom. And a full and proper contemplation of the meaning and sacrifice of June 16 might help remind that freedom is not simply the right to put a mark on one’s ballot, every five years.
The Soweto Uprising was a series of protests led by high school students in South Africa that began on the morning of 16 June 1976.
Students from numerous Sowetan schools began to protest in the streets of Soweto in response to the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in local schools. It is estimated that 200,000 students took part in the protests. They were met with fierce police brutality. The number of protesters killed by police is usually given as 176, but estimates of up to 700 have been made. In remembrance of these events, the 16th of June is now a public holiday in South Africa, named Youth Day.
Causes of the protests
Black South African high school students in Soweto protested against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which forced all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50–50 mix as languages of instruction The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from 1 January 1975, Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade), according to the Afrikaans Medium Decree; English would be the medium of instruction for general science and practical subjects (homecraft, needlework, woodwork, metalwork, art, agricultural science). Indigenous languages would only be used for religious instruction, music, and physical culture.
The association of Afrikaans with Apartheid prompted black South Africans to prefer English. Even the Bantustan regimes chose English and an indigenous African language as official languages. In addition, English was gaining prominence as the language most often used in commerce and industry. The 1974 decree was intended to forcibly reverse the decline of Afrikaans among black Africans. The Afrikaner-dominated government used the clause of the 1909 Union of South Africa Act that recognised only English and Dutch (the latter being replaced by Afrikaans in 1925) as official languages as the pretext to do so.[9] While all schools had to provide instruction in both Afrikaans and English as languages, white South African students learned other subjects in their home language.
Punt Janson, the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education at the time, was quoted as saying: "A Black man may be trained to work on a farm or in a factory. He may work for an employer who is either English-speaking or Afrikaans-speaking and the man who has to give him instructions may be either English-speaking or Afrikaans-speaking. Why should we now start quarrelling about the medium of instruction among the Black people as well? ... No, I have not consulted them and I am not going to consult them. I have consulted the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa …"
The decree was resented deeply by blacks, because Afrikaans was widely viewed—in the words of Desmond Tutu, bishop of Lesotho and later Dean of Johannesburg—as "the language of the oppressor". Teacher organisations, such as the African Teachers Association of South Africa, objected to the decree. A change in language of instruction forced the students to focus on understanding the language instead of the subject material. This made critical analysis of the content difficult and discouraged critical thinking.
The resentment grew until 30 April 1976, when children at Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their rebellion then spread to many other schools in Soweto. Black South African students protested because they believed that they deserved to be treated and taught equally to white South Africans. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Teboho "Tsietsi" Mashinini, proposed a meeting on 13 June 1976 to discuss what should be done. Students formed an Action Committee (later known as the Soweto Students' Representative Council), which organised a mass rally for 16 June, to make themselves heard.
Uprising
On the morning of 16 June 1976, between 10,000 and 20,000[14] black students walked from their schools to Orlando Stadium for a rally to protest against having to learn through Afrikaans in school. Many students who later participated in the protest arrived at school that morning without prior knowledge of the protest, yet agreed to become involved. The protest was planned by the Soweto Students' Representative Council's (SSRC) Action Committee, with support from the wider Black Consciousness Movement. Teachers in Soweto also supported the march after the Action Committee emphasised good discipline and peaceful action.
Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School.[16] The students began the march only to find out that police had barricaded the road along their intended route. The leader of the action committee asked the crowd not to provoke the police and the march continued on another route, eventually ending up near Orlando High School. The crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 students made their way towards the area of the school. Students sang and waved placards with slogans such as, "Down with Afrikaans", "Viva Azania" and "If we must do Afrikaans, Vorster must do Zulu".
The police set their dog on the protesters, who responded by killing it. The police then began to shoot directly at the children.
One of the first students to be shot dead was 12-year-old Hector Pieterson. He was shot at Orlando West High School and became the symbol of the Soweto uprising. The police attacks on the demonstrators continued and 23 people died on the first day in Soweto. Among them was Dr Melville Edelstein, who had devoted his life to social welfare among blacks.He was stoned to death by the mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming "Beware Afrikaners".
The violence escalated, as bottle stores and beer halls—seen as outposts of the apartheid government—were targeted, as were the official outposts of the state. The violence abated by nightfall. Police vans and armoured vehicles patrolled the streets throughout the night.
Emergency clinics were swamped with injured and bloody children. The police requested that the hospital provide a list of all victims with bullet wounds. The hospital administrator passed this request to the doctors, but the doctors refused to create the list. Doctors recorded bullet wounds as abscesses.
The 1,500 heavily armed police officers deployed to Soweto on 17 June carried weapons including automatic rifles, stun guns, and carbines.They drove around in armoured vehicles with helicopters monitoring the area from the sky. The South African Army was also ordered on standby as a tactical measure to show military force. Crowd control methods used by South African police at the time included mainly dispersement techniques.
Casualties
The number of people who died is usually given as 176 with estimates up to 2,980 would by gun firer The original government figure claimed only 23 students were killed the number of wounded was estimated to be close to three thousand people.Aftermath
The aftermath of the uprising established the leading role of the ANC in the anti-apartheid struggle, as it was the body best able to channel and organise students seeking the end of apartheid. So, although the BCM's ideas had been important in creating the climate that gave the students the confidence to strike out, it was the ANC's non-racialism which came to dominate the discourse of the anti-apartheid movement amongst blacks. The perspectives set out in Joe Slovo's essay No Middle Road – written at just this time and predicting the apartheid government had only the choice between more repression and overthrow by the revolutionaries – were highly influential.
The clashes also occurred at a time when the South African Government was being forced to "transform" apartheid in international eyes towards a more "benign" form. In October 1976, Transkei, the first Bantustan, was proclaimed "independent" by the South African Government. This attempt to showcase supposed South African "commitment" to self-determination backfired, however, when Transkei was internationally derided as a puppet state.
For the state the uprising marked the most fundamental challenge yet to apartheid and the economic (see below) and political instability it caused was heightened by the strengthening international boycott. It was a further 14 years before Nelson Mandela was released, but at no point was the state able to restore the relative peace and social stability of the early 1970s as black resistance grew.
Many white South African citizens were outraged at the government's actions in Soweto, and about 300 white students from the University of the Witwatersrand marched through Johannesburg's city centre in protest of the killing of children. Black workers went on strike as well and joined them as the campaign progressed. Riots also broke out in the black townships of other cities in South Africa.
Student organisations directed the energy and anger of the youth toward political resistance. Students in Thembisa organised a successful and non-violent solidarity march, but a similar protest held in Kagiso led to police stopping a group of participants and forcing them to retreat, before killing at least five people while waiting for reinforcements. The violence only died down on 18 June. The University of Zululand's records and administration buildings were set ablaze, and 33 people died in incidents in Port Elizabeth in August. In Cape Town 92 people died between August and September.
Most of the bloodshed had abated by the close of 1976, but by that time the death toll stood at more than 600.
The continued clashes in Soweto caused economic instability. The South African rand devalued fast and the government was plunged into a crisis.
The African National Congress printed and distributed leaflets with the slogan "Free Mandela, Hang Vorster", immediately linking the language issue to its revolutionary heritage and programme and helping establish its leading role (see Baruch Hirson's "Year of Fire, Year of Ash" for a discussion of the ANC's ability to channel and direct the popular anger).
International reaction
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 392 which strongly condemned the incident and the apartheid government.
A week after the uprising began, Henry Kissinger, the United States Secretary of State, met the South African State President, B. J. Vorster in West Germany to discuss the situation in Rhodesia, but the Soweto uprising did not feature in their discussions. Kissinger and Vorster met again in Pretoria in September 1976, with students in Soweto and elsewhere protesting his visit, and being fired on by police.
African National Congress (ANC) exiles called for international action and more economic sanctions against South Africa.
In the media
Images of the riots spread all over the world, shocking millions. The photograph of Hector Pieterson's dead body, as captured by photojournalistSam Nzima, caused outrage and brought down international condemnation on the Apartheid government.
The Soweto riots are depicted in the 1987 film by director Richard Attenborough, Cry Freedom, and in the 1992 musical film Sarafina!. The riots also inspired the novel A Dry White Season by Andre Brink, and a 1989 movie of the same title. The Soweto uprising also featured in the 2003 filmStander about notorious bank robber and former police captain, Andre Stander. The lyrics of the song "Soweto Blues" by Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba describe the Soweto Uprising and the children's part in it.
Radio
20 years after the uprising, in June 1996, the Ulwazi Educational Radio Project of Johannesburg compiled an hour-long radio documentary portraying the events of 16 June entirely from the perspective of people living in Soweto at the time. Many of the students who planned or joined the uprising took part, as did other witnesses, including photographer Peter Magubane, reporter Sophie Tema, and Tim Wilson, the white doctor who pronounced Hector Pieterson dead in Baragwanath hospital. The programme was broadcast on SABC and on a number of local radio stations throughout South Africa. The following year, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service broadcast a revised version containing fresh interviews and entitled The Day Apartheid Died.[30] The programme was runner-up at the 1998 European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) TV & Radio Awards and also at the 1998 Media Awards of the One World International Broadcasting Trust, and was highly commended at the 1998 Prix Italia radio awards. In May 1999, it was re-broadcast by BBC Radio 4 as The Death of Apartheid with a fresh introduction, providing added historical context for a British audience, by Anthony Sampson, former editor of Drum magazine and author of the authorised biography (1999) of Nelson Mandela. Sampson linked extracts from the BBC Sound Archive that charted the long struggle against apartheid from the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, through the riots of 1976 and the murder of Steve Biko, and right up to Mandela's release from prison in 1990 and the future president's speech in which he acknowledged the debt owed by all black South Africans to the students who gave their lives in Soweto on 16 June 1976
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