It was a decisive turning point in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. On 16 June 1976, students took to the streets of Soweto to protest against the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in Black schools.
What followed was a massacre, with 176 dead after the police opening fired, and a death toll that came closer to 700 as the protests spread across the country.
“The 1976 struggle was, in its broadness, a fight against apartheid, but we knew that there’s a pillar of that system of apartheid that we needed to deal with, and that was education,” said Seth Mazibuko who was one of the student leaders at the time.
One of the most enduring symbols of the Soweto uprising is that of 13-year-old Hector Pieterson. Soweto resident, Mrs Sixolo, was a first-hand witness of the apartheid police’s actions on that day.
She said that she that the police were in her street and she could not believe her eyes as she went outside with other parents.
“In all this commotion, this little boy Hector Pieterson came from this side and I said to them, ‘Don’t go this side, this police are shooting, don’t go this side’,” she said.
“And my word wasn’t cold. They shot the little boy, and he fell here, just here. He didn’t die there, he fell here.”
South African photographer Sam Nzima’s photo of his lifeless body being carried by another student moments after he was shot, shocked the world and became a symbol of apartheid’s brutality.
News reports of the police action led to increased international condemnation, boycotts, and economic sanctions.
Within a year, the United Nations Security Council imposed an arms embargo on South Africa.
Apartheid officially ended in 1994, but many believe the dream of a better life for all young people has not materialised.
For Mazibuko, the fading traces of the uprising on Soweto’s streets, are more than a quirk of urban maintenance.
He thinks they symbolise a nation failing to honour the legacy of Soweto or deliver the future for which its children died.
“People get drunk to go and dance over death. That’s the sad part of our history,” he said, adding that “the very respect of that day is not given”.
Mazibuko gives regular talks at schools about the Soweto uprising. He recalled a moment at one that brought him to tears.
“There was this one girl who is African, a black girl,” he said. “I asked her, do you know who Hector Pieterson is? She said: ‘Sarafina’.”
The reference is to a 1992 musical starring Whoopi Goldberg that was inspired by the uprising. Mazibuko criticised it as blurring the line between history and performance.
It “is not even representing the history of 1976 very well”, he said, describing the film as a “distortion” saying “it’s making our children dance”.
For Antoinette Sithole, Hector Pieterson’s sister – who appears in Nzima’s photograph screaming beside her brother’s body – the horror of 16 June has not faded.
“It is like yesterday,” the 66-year-old said.
She said she overcame the “pain and trauma” by mentally stepping away from the event, as though it belonged to a book rather than her own life.
But she often returns to the Hector Pieterson Museum, one of the few preserved sites linked to the uprising.
Like many victims’ relatives, Sithole is bitter over a lack of justice for apartheid-era crimes, particularly for perpetrators who did not receive amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Some families, as we speak, they haven’t found closure,” she said.
The unresolved grief is compounded by the realities of South Africa today, more than three decades after the country’s first democratic elections brought Nelson Mandela to power.
“There’s so much to do,” Sithole said, reminiscing about the “high hopes” there had been for a black-led government. “We were fantasising, thinking that our lives were going to be better.”
Instead, unemployment stands at more than 32 per cent, while violent crime remains among the highest in the world, with more than 60 murders on average a day.
South Africa is also the most unequal country globally, according to the Gini coefficient indicator of income inequality.
Mazibuko adds that “many of us are staying in shacks as we speak”.
“I still see young people in the streets more than at work or at school. Many of our leaders do not see that because they live in suburbs.”
The “young people that are lying in their graves now, they should be shaken and they should be saying: ‘This is not what we died for’,” he said
After the end of apartheid, the new democratic government declared 16 June as National Youth Day, a public holiday intended to honour the uprising.
Soweto is marking the 50th anniversary of Youth Day with a four-day commemorative programme starting on Saturday.
