It is 25 years since the Soweto uprising. Jeremy Baskin examines three new books that reflect on that seismic event
Where were you on June 16 1976? The question has an iconic status among South Africans of a certain age, the way Americans remember where they were when JF Kennedy was shot. Three new books deal, in different ways, with that turbulent year. With hindsight we know the Soweto uprising led, by twists and turns, to the democratic elections of 1994. They were the moment when the tide turned against apartheid.
The uprisings were not restricted to Soweto and soon spread to all parts of the country. They were mostly led by young people and students, often against the wishes of their parents. Hundreds died as the authorities struggled to reassert control. These uprisings marked the politicisation of a new generation, after more than a decade of quiescence. In their aftermath thousands fled the country into exile, mass-based organisations grew, and the regime became increasingly isolated. The rest, as they say, is history.
Of the three new books on the subject, the bizarrely titled The Rocky Rioter Teargas Show, by Pat Hopkins and Helen Grange (Zebra), is easy to read and gives one a sense of the time the arrogance of the apartheid officials, white incomprehension about how blacks could destroy “their” facilities, the fact that TV had newly arrived, and the magnitude of the uprising itself. But this book is also the least satisfying.
It aims to tell “the inside story of the 1976 Soweto uprising” but in truth the book adds little new information and no new insights, and it is hard to see in what sense it is an “insider’s account”. The authors have largely strung together reports and opinions gleaned from the newspapers of the time, with the result that there is a surfeit of opinions from liberal newspaper editors and long-extinct commentators.
Reflections in Prison, edited by Mac Maharaj (Zebra), is an insider account of a different type. It brings together a number of essays by the top leadership of the liberation movement on Robben Island. Written in 1976, on the eve of the Soweto uprising, and smuggled out of the prison, these essays provide fascinating insights into the thinking of that time. Remember, these leaders had been in prison for many years, some for well over a decade. Their hopes for speedy liberation had been dashed, their organisations had been driven into exile and almost destroyed, and their treatment on Robben Island was harsh and often cruel. While they continued to live by the injunction to uphold the “optimism of the will”, in truth they had little grounds for optimism.
It must have been tempting to edit these essays to make them more acceptable to the modern reader, and the authors should be saluted for not doing so. In one essay Nelson Mandela, on the eve of the Soweto uprising, cautions that 14 years after the first Umkhonto weSizwe recruits were sent out, the armed struggle had still not begun inside South Africa. He even suggests that to reject the impending “independence” of Transkei would bring the African National Congress (ANC) into conflict with the wishes of the people! And he rejects the labelling of anti-apartheid parties in the homelands as “stooges”. No wonder Mangosuthu Buthelezi was confused when the 1976 generation labelled him just that.
Many of the essays remind one of how intensely Cold War divisions affected the liberation movement and helped sustain apartheid well past its sell-by date. Another essay by Mandela reflects his concern that the black consciousness movement might be the brainchild of the CIA and that it was misdirected by pursuing “bourgeois philosophies of existentialism”.
But leaving aside details of the time, Mandela’s essays reveal him to be a unifier. He acknowledges the achievements of the newly-formed black consciousness movement (BCM) more generously than some of his colleagues did. His tone is that of an understanding father dealing with inexperienced youth, and it is not hard to understand why some of the new, young BCM prisoners reacted badly. He is deeply pragmatic, inclined towards focusing on national liberation rather than on the shape of the future society. “The finer details of our future social order … will be the product of empirical conditions at the moment of victory.” In many respects the Mandela of these essays is the same man we know today.
The essay by Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) leader John Nyati Pokela is very different abstract in content, millennialist in tone. The contrast with Mandela’s pragmatism could hardly be sharper. It helped me understand why the PAC never transformed its post-Sharpeville promise into sustained organisation. In truth, it was the ANC that effectively built on and channelled the mass anger that flowed out of the Soweto uprisings. But it was the PAC that was arguably better placed, being closer in spirit to the black consciousness movement and the slogans of the uprisings.
The third book is simply called Soweto: 16 June 1976 (Kwela), has no single author and is about the footsoldiers of the Soweto uprisings, none of them leaders. The least glamorous of the books under review, it presents the memories of 30 ordinary Sowetans, students at the time, and their experiences of June 16. In its concern for popular history it is also the one most in touch with the mood of that time.
The picture that emerges is one in which real people experience real struggles. Some know that demonstrations have been planned for that day. Others do not. For Bongani Mnguni it all started with a dog, when the students he was with stopped running from a police dog, and instead fought back, stoned and killed it. Another student, Gandhi, remembers the singing and dancing, and feeling joy and anger and pain at the same time. Others remember burning cars, seeing bottle stores looted, some drinking, others scared to drink because their parents might smell the liquor on their breath.
Bafana remembers marching alongside an older woman, incongruously named Baby, who taught him how to water down teargas and who was then shot dead alongside him by the police. He cannot forget how her corpse was thrown into the back of a police van.
The disruptions meant many of the ordinary participants never finished their schooling. Some fled the country to study. Others joined the armed struggle. Most simply had to find a job. One of the least-recorded aspects of the Soweto uprisings was that within a few years they changed the trade unions, bringing in a new generation of worker leaders and a new spirit of militance. In the process, the older, often more conservative, migrant worker leaders were displaced.
What comes through in this book is the magnitude of the changes, personal as much as political, that the Soweto uprisings unleashed. Vusi still believes if he had finished school he would “be somewhere”. Dan (Moyane) wanted to be a doctor he became a successful radio producer and presenter. Phydian never got his matric, believing that those students who rewrote their exams in 1977 were “selling out”.
Of the 30 interviewees about one-third are today either unemployed or in jobs like hawking. They don’t express regret that the uprising happened. Indeed some express pride and say it made them stronger. And all express the view that their lives changed in 1976. Most shockingly, many of the interviewees say they are speaking for the first time about what they experienced!
Journalist Timothy Garton Ash has concluded that societies dealing with morally freighted pasts have four options. They can opt for purges, for trials, for forgetting, or they can opt for pedagogy (“history lessons”). The Kempton Park deal brought about a relatively peaceful transition from apartheid, and in the process largely ruled out purges and trials.
A few years ago, while talking to a group of young black university students, all in their 20s, I was shocked to realise that I was taking for granted their knowledge of apartheid. Many seemed genuinely perplexed by references to pass laws or to Steve Biko. One, a young Indian South African, from an educated, professional family, had no knowledge that until not so long ago Indians were not allowed in the Free State. Perhaps so many choose the route of forgetting because it is easier, and allows one to get on with one’s life. Or perhaps they are not being offered history lessons. Or perhaps our history lessons don’t always speak to the lived experience of ordinary people.
The American poet Maya Angelou has written: “History, despite its wrenching pain/ Cannot be unlived, but if faced/ With courage, need not be lived again.” These three books help us face that history.