Johannesburg - What was June 16, 1976 Soweto Uprisings really about? This is a perennial question that needs to be properly addressed with utmost honesty.
It has become crystal clear that this question is hugely side-skirted and at most, distorted. The danger, however, comes with the deliberate misrepresentation and erasure of this monumental epoch in the history of black resistance movement in this country of ours, Azania.
The chicanery of the master-plotters of the rainbow nation in decontextualising and delinking this from the broader liberation project has been a very lethal substance injected in our psyche and social narrative. Black people need to take full responsibility on this matter, reclaim June 16, restore its sacred stature and remove all the convenient and artificial ambiguities around it.
In my view, the decision by the powers that be to liberally misname June 16 the so-called “Youth Day” is not accidental. It was a deliberate effort and ploy to shift the psyche of the excited post-1994 society, poetically branded the “rainbow nation”, from the correct narrative of the revolution of the oppressed people of Azania against colonialism, white supremacy, exploitation and oppression, generally.
Weaning June 16 from its proper context is a desperate attempt to depoliticise and de-historicise the act of resistance. We urgently need to wriggle out of this colossal subterfuge. The famous line by Don Mattera, “memory is the weapon”, should aid us in our battle against forgetting the truth, and our history. It’s our responsibility as black people in this country to wage the fight against distortions and defacements of our rich historical truth.
Many people, unfortunately including some black politicians associated with the erstwhile liberation movement, still think that the rejection of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools (alongside English on a 50-50 basis) was the ultimate objective of the revolutionary act of June 16, 1976. It was not. The introduction of Afrikaans in this sense was, as part of the Bantu education project, a consciously worked-out strategy for the pursuance of white supremacy and colonialism by our oppressors.
As part of a wider strategy to perpetually make black people serfs of white oppressors (both Afrikaans and English-speaking equally), the education system needed to resonate with this exploitative agenda. Apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd thus stated: “There Is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.”
In this vein, Verwoerd argued that, “Blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education, they should know that their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water”. The earnestness by the Afrikaner or apartheid regime to bulldoze black communities and force Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools should be reinterpreted and seen in this philosophical and political context.
The interpretations that have denuded June 16, 1976 of its political and historical texture (into a “youth day”) neutralises the issue and lends itself to multiple interpretations and meanings. That is why in one country, you see different groupings and parties separately recognising this day in various ways.
It is thus intriguing that almost all parties and races have something to say about June 16. After all, every ethnic group and racial group has youth. Therefore, we see children and descendants of the perpetrators of the evil and ghastly deed, 46 years ago, also shamelessly embracing this Black Power day.
Whilst the rainbow government of the ANC, like other pro-white groupings, “celebrate” the tragic event of 1976 in the guise of “youth day”, for black people this defies logic. The day dedicated to the killing of black people in Soweto and elsewhere in Azania can only be “commemorated”. It should be marked by sombreness and deep reflection of the pain suffered by the victims of the erstwhile white oppressive regime. Once again, this misnomer of “youth day” should be discontinued.
No matter how hard one may try, one will not succeed to dupe the people, for the truth is constant. It does not need a majority, sponsorship nor propagation in order to prevail. It remains the truth. As I have recently pointed out, the incontestable reality is that the action by students in 1976 was not a mere spontaneous act.
It was a result of events, actions and plans that had been deliberately calculated by black leaders in black communities through the network of BCM (black consciousness movement) formations. For me, the Soweto uprisings were about Black Power, resistance to apartheid and white supremacy, and importantly the restoration of black dignity.
All these pertinent aspects were the preoccupation of Steve Biko’s black consciousness movement. Central to these are cultural and economic powers. This speaks to the repossession of land and the nationalisation of the mines and other minerals for the benefit of the people. In this regard, a lot of anti-black things and apartheid relics in this post-1994 society precipitate serious rethinking exercise on Codesa negotiations that have birthed this neo-apartheid society.
It is thus important to recognise that the problems many people and various political parties highlight every year on June 16 will not be addressed until the oppressed unite against this oppressive system. In fact, solidarity and unity is an old piece of wisdom in the history of black struggles around the globe.
This is the position that the likes of Pixley Ka Isaka Seme, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe adopted in their quest to liberate the Afrikan continent in the 1900s. It is therefore frustrating to see black people so hugely divided in respect of a single act or event that speaks to black pain.
The question of unity and black solidarity proved indispensable in recent weeks, particularly with the case of Sibanye-Stillwater workers affiliated to the Association of Mine and Construction Union (Amcu) and National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) who decided to tackle their employer as a united front.
In this light, the commemoration of the Soweto Uprisings on Thursday by Azapo and the PAC at Regina Mundi Church in Soweto sent a very strong symbolic message on how to reinterpret this epochal day in our political history. In underlying the importance of this unity, PAC president, Mzwanele Nyhontso, said the united action between both organisations is “something that Sobukwe and Biko would be proud of”. He added that it was done in honour of the “martyrs of 1976” and as pushback against the betrayal of the 1994 settlement which he described as “a fluke and a failure”.
In the same breath, the president of Azapo, Nelvis Qekema, likened the co-operation between Azapo and PAC as “a spear and a shield” located in the black people’s journey of the struggle against apartheid. In this respect, he asserted that the co-operation symbolised the unity of Biko and Sobukwe. He argued that “June 16 belongs to Azapo and PAC”, and should thus be reclaimed in order to be accorded the veneration it deserves as it represents the tree of liberation watered by the blood of the martyrs and heroes of June 1976.
I am really concerned that there is something crucial missing in the melee of “celebrations” and “commemorations” of the June 16 Soweto Uprisings. And that is black consciousness! The absence of black consciousness and Afrikan consciousness renders the whole thing a mere routine or drill performed every year with no meaningful and revolutionary outcome.
This point becomes quite stark when dissecting the participation of ANC leaders in government on this day. It appears so fake, if not tenuous, for people deemed to have been “in power” for the past 28 years, to shamelessly face black people every year to talk about the same challenges and crises that black people are seized with. It’s become a sad tale of leaders paying lip service to the pain that black people endure each and every passing day.
This yields the ludicrous, if not paradoxical, scenario whereby those who are responsible for our misery (owing to corruption, greed, looting, neoliberalism and co-option into whiteness) are the ones promising to deliver on the deferred dream of true liberation and freedom.
The EFF leader, Julius Malema, captured this moment rather presciently: “The president’s bank is too full, and he is banking his dollars in a mattress. Is this what Hector Pieterson was killed for? What is R350 when a man has so many millions and he is eating them alone. They are buying us, they are buying our silence. We don’t want R350; we want jobs.”
Similarly, I quite frankly find it rather awkward listening to beneficiaries of apartheid talking about the “pain” or the “blood” of the fallen heroes of June 16. It just sounds so incredulous and simply a matter of stagecraft.
I embrace the view by former president of Azapo and BCM veteran, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, that June 16, 1976 must remind us that black people should be mentally free so that they can reject a system that makes us foreigners in our land. It becomes imperative, he adds, that we should not be distracted and focus on the reclamation of the land because “without the land you have no sovereignty”.
A formidable case has been made for us to halt the complacency with which we have dealt with the June 16 Soweto Uprisings. We should not be complicit in the erasure of our own painful history by calling it a “youth” event. This has led us to this resounding madness of celebrating tragedies.
If we do not locate this day in its proper political context, the next 28 years will find us, every year, spouting rhetorical phrases of freedom, while we singing the painful songs of “Senzeni na” and “Thina sizwe se mnyama sikhalela lizwe”. What an oxymoron!
So, what must be done? This day, in our calendar, must be viewed as a day of reflection in order to sharpen our black consciousness and to search for the true meaning of the June 16 Soweto Uprising.
June 16 was therefore a revolutionary episode, which should rekindle our fight for true liberation which was betrayed at the table of Codesa. True liberation of black people can only be attained through unity. As Nyhontso said, “Unity of Africans is sacrosanct”. Mayibuye iAfrika. Izwe Lethu!
David Letsoalo is a Sankarist, an activist and Law academic