Not a normal day
On the morning of 16 June
1976 I woke as normal, had breakfast, and drove to work, as I did
every day. The streets of Durban looked the same as they had done for
the six years I had lived there, and my office was the same as it had
been for the three or so years I had worked as Sales Office Manager
for a large motor firm in the industrial area.
But outward appearances
were, as they so often are, very deceptive, because this day was not
normal, was not the same as all the previous days of my life. But I
just was not yet aware of how different, how out of the ordinary, the
day truly was.
The start of a sea change
I became aware as I drove
home along Umbilo Road and bought, as I did every afternoon, my copy
of the Daily News from a street vendor. Only when I got home and
opened the newspaper did I start to get an inkling of just how
different that day was. I saw the page one headline “10000 in
Death Riot” and the difference that that day would represent for
me and for South Africa started to dawn on me.
I guess I did not at first
realise the full depth of the change that had come to South Africa
right away, but I was certainly aware that something was in the air,
as I immediately started to keep clippings of the events as they
started to unfold in press reports. The accompanying pictures are from this collection of clippings that I started that day.
This day 33 years later
still resonates in the consciousnesses of all who were aware at the
time. It marked a sea change, a breakthrough moment in the struggle
against apartheid and all that white domination meant. It was the day
the children said to their elders, in effect, “Stand aside, we
are the future, we are the struggle, we will end apartheid.”
The Children’s Uprising
And they were right, and
that is why this day is still celebrated in South Africa as “Youth
Day”, an official holiday. This day marks an important milestone
on the long, winding and often dangerous road from oppression to
liberty, from authoritarianism to democracy in South Africa.
Before 16 June 1976 most
Black leaders opposed to apartheid were either in prison or in exile
and the struggle had been based on their demands for equality and a
strategy of sometimes patient negotiation and sometimes impatient
acts of violence and sabotage.
The “children’s
uprising” marked the end of patience on the part of the
children, who rejected their parents’ accommodation to the apartheid
state and decided to take their fate into their own hands.
The immediate cause of the
uprising was the decree by the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education at
the time, Dr Andries Treurnicht, a noted right-winger, that
henceforth 50% of tuition in Black schools was to be in the medium of
Afrikaans. This was bitterly resented by both parents and children,
and in spite of warnings of the consequences that could ensue from
the imposition of this ruling, the government, in the person of Dr
Treurnicht, was adamant that the ruling would stay.. His view was
reported in the Daily News of 17 June, “In the white part of
South Africa, where the Government supplies the buildings, gives
subsidies, and pays teachers it surely had the right to determine
what the language in schools should be.”
Warnings unheeded
The insistence on this was
like flame to dry tinder, the dry tinder being the anger and
resentment of Blacks at their continued oppression, the history of
more than 300 years of racism which was increasingly legalised and
institutionalised.
If the government had been
at all sensitive to the signs of the times, it might have made some
accommodations of its own.
As the editor of the Natal
Mercury wrote on 17 June: “The real tragedy of yesterday’s
bloody riot at Soweto, in which a number of people died, is that it
might never have happened if the authorities had heeded earlier alarm
signals.”
One of the alarm signals
was sounded by the man who became the first white victim of the
violence, Dr Melville Edelstein, in whose car when he was killed was
a book which he had written in 1972 on why Afrikaans should not be
used as a medium of instruction in Black schools.
Another warning signal had
come a just six weeks before 16 June from the then Dean of St Mary’s
Cathedral in Johannesburg, Desmond Mpilo Tutu, who wrote a letter in
early May to Prime Minister John Vorster saying, “I am writing
to you, Sir, because I have a growing nightmarish fear that unless
something drastic is done very soon then bloodshed and violence are
going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably.”
“I am frightened,
dreadfully frightened,” Tutu continued in his letter, “that
we may soon reach a point of no return, when events will generate a
momentum of their own, when nothing will stop their reaching bloody
denouement which is ‘too ghastly to contemplate,’ to quote your
words, Sir.”
Vorster had some weeks
before urged whites in the then Rhodesia to negotiate with the
liberation movements in that country because the alternative would be
“too ghastly to contemplate.”
As the editorial in the
Natal Daily News of 17 June said, “We are so desperately slow to
learn.”
In the week end newspapers
following the outbreak of the violence, Dean Tutu was quoted as
commenting on all the warnings that had been made about the feelings
of Blacks: “But all these pleas have been spurned – and now we
have the reality of Soweto. How much longer will Whites refuse to
hear our anguished cry for justice and freedom?”
Through the fire to freedom
Of course as we now know
the bloody days of June 1976 were succeeded by many more months of
violence and intimidation on the part of the government, and
retaliatory violence from the oppressed. This violence continued, in
waves and at different times in different places for years after,
until eventually the apartheid government was forced by circumstances
to at last unban and release Black leaders, and sit down with them at
the negotiating table, as Vorster had advised the Rhodesians to do
more than a decade before.
And now, 33 years later,
there is still a legacy of bitterness and anger to be dealt with, in
spite of the fact that South Africa has a democratic government and a
Bill of Rights written into its constitution.
But the present is a time
of new hope and a looking toward the future, a future made more real
by the sacrifices of the past, so that a Black journalist,
Thembelihle Tshabala, can write in the latest Mail and Guardian
newspaper, who recently walked the route of the 1976 student protests
in Soweto: “And, suddenly, I became conscious of my own liberty
and of the loves lost so I could walk my Soweto streets without fear.
And I felt grateful. And I felt free.”
That, surely, is the sign
that the years of struggle were worth it, that the students of 1976
did not die in vain, because now we all are free at last.
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