IAM'ART'LIMPOPO: June 2020

YOUTH UPRISING

CELEBRATING

44th ANNIVERSARY

In 2020

REMEMBERING

THE YOUTH

OF 1976

TAKING IT BACK WITH IAM'ART'LIMPOPO

Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo after being shot by the South African police. His sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs beside them. Pieterson was rushed to a local clinic and declared dead on arrival. This photo by Sam Nzima became an icon of the Soweto uprising.

LocationSoweto, South AfricaDate16 June 1976; 44 years agoDeaths176 (with some estimates ranging up to 700)Injured4,000VictimsStudentsAssailants South African Policeman

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.[2] It is estimated that 20,000 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.[3][4][5] In remembrance of these events, 16 June is now a public holiday in South Africa, named Youth Day.[6]

THE 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,[15] 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.[17] 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".[18]

Mashinini was born in 1957. He was a bright, popular and successful student at Morris Isaacson High School^[1] in Soweto where he was the head of the debate team and president of the Methodist Wesley Guild .

A move by South Africa's apartheid government to make the language Afrikaans an equal mandatory language of education for all South Africans in conjunction with English was extremely unpopular with black and English-speaking South African students.

A student himself, Mashinini planned a mass demonstration by students for 16 June 1976.^[1] This demonstration which would become known as the Soweto Uprising lasted for three days during which several hundred people were killed.

Having been identified as the leader of the uprising by the South African government, Mashinini fled South Africa in exile, first to London then later to various other African countries, including Liberia where he was briefly married to Miss Liberia 1977, Welma Campbell.

He died under mysterious circumstances, possibly of homicide, in the summer of 1990 while in exile in Guinea.^[2] His body was repatriated to South Africa on 4 August 1990 where he was interred in Avalon Cemetery. His grave bears the epitaph "Black Power."^[3

The police set their trained dog on the protesters, who responded by killing it.[19] The police then began to shoot directly at the children.

Among the first students to be shot dead were 15 year old Hastings Ndlovu and 13 year old Hector Pieterson, who were shot at Orlando West High School.[20] The photographer Sam Nzima took a photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson as he was carried away by Mbuyisa Makhubo and accompanied by his sister, Antoinette Sithole. The photograph 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 Afrikaans is the most dangerous drug for our future".[21]

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 to prosecute them for rioting. The hospital administrator passed this request to the doctors, but the doctors refused to create the list. Doctors recorded bullet wounds as abscesses.[13][20]

The 1,500 heavily armed police officers deployed to Soweto on 17 June carried weapons including automatic rifles, stun guns, and carbines.[13] 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 700.[4] The original government figure claimed only 23 students were killed;[22] the number of wounded was estimated to be over a thousand people.

CAUSES OF THE PROTEST

CAUSES OF THE PROTEST

"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.[7] 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).[7] Indigenous languages would only be used for religious instruction, music, and physical culture.[8]

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 …"[10]

The decree was resented deeply by the black populace. Desmond Tutu, bishop of Lesotho and later Dean of Johannesburg, stated that Afrikaans was "the language of the oppressor". Teacher organisations, such as the African Teachers Association of South Africa, objected to the decree.[11] 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.[12]

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),[13] which organised a mass rally for 16 June, to make themselves heard.