As we prepare for Youth Day on Tuesday, we have to think back to those two fateful days, 16 and 17 June 1976 – 44 years ago – when police shot on unarmed protesters in Soweto, killing hundreds of young people. Their crime was to oppose being taught in Afrikaans.
Soweto 1976, as it became known for many years afterwards, had a profound effect on our country, but also personally on many young people, including me. I was 16 at the time and confronted the political realities of South Africa for the first time. It set me on a path of opposing racism, exploitation, oppression and injustice, which I still do today.
The impact on the country was huge because, for the first time since the banning of liberation organisations in 1960, there was widespread mass defiance in our country. Faced with a repressive state who were not afraid to use their security forces to suppress internal political dissent, many young people from all across the country – as the protest spread like wildfire – left for exile and joined the banned African National Congress or the Pan-Africanist Congress.
What happened in 1976 would influence the protests of the next decade and a half before the Nationalist Party government finally agreed to release political prisoners and begin negotiations to usher in a democracy.
One of the first actions of the new democratic government, which we elected on 27 April 1994, was to rename Soweto Day as Youth Day, which could have had the effect of divorcing the day from its history in an attempt to get us to focus on the issues facing young people in our society today.
But history is important – as with Sharpeville Day which was renamed Human Rights Day in our democracy – because it can remind us where we come from and where we should never go back to.
I was in Standard 8 (Grade 10) at Crystal High School in Hanover Park in 1976 when Albert Fritz, one of our student leaders and now an MEC in the Western Cape government, went from class to class to explain to us what had happened in Soweto. There was no social media at the time. In fact, television was only introduced in South Africa a few months earlier, but most households were too poor to possess a TV set.
The result of Bertie Fritz’s intervention was that our school joined thousands of schools throughout the country protesting in support of the students in Soweto.
Contrary to the attempts of historical revisionists, over the course of about four months, the protests in the Western Cape spread not only in African areas, such as Langa and Nyanga, but also to “coloured” townships such as Elsies River, Bonteheuwel, Grassy Park, Athlone, Heideveld, Ravensmead, Esselen Park in Worcester and many other areas. It also spread to the University of the Western Cape, which was supposed to be for “coloured” students, and the University of Cape Town, which was reserved for whites.
Many of the young people who were involved in the protests in 1976 would have been inspired by the ideas of Steve Biko who promoted black pride in a nonracial context, as opposed to the humiliation suffered by blacks under apartheid. For Biko, blacks had to lead the struggle, but they should not exclude anyone who shared their ideals. Blacks for him meant Africans, Indians and coloureds, a definition which eventually became part of democratic South Africa’s Constitution.
There are many lessons that we can learn from what happened in 1976, lessons that could help us understand our current situation a bit better. These include: young people have the potential to bring about change in society and must lead this process, with support from people with experience; the struggle against racism must be based on a non-racist or, even better, an anti-racist alternative; and populist revisionists should not be allowed to write out of history the contributions of many who sacrificed for our freedom.
We need to learn these lessons so that we do not end up repeating mistakes that could easily have been avoided.
(Specially written as a blog for this website. First published 12 June 2020)
