protests
Marianne Merten
Students from the Cape Peninsula joined their colleagues in Soweto in protest against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction and police brutality 25 years ago.
August 11 marks the 25th anniversary of the protests by pupils from Langa and Guguletu townships, which spread across the Cape Flats and prompted solidarity demonstrations by students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
The South African Democracy Education Trust (Sadet) is holding a photo exhibition and a public meeting at the Ikwezi Community Centre in Guguletu to commemorate the anniversary and to gather eyewitness testimonies as part of its history reconstruction project.
On August 11 1976 pupils from Langa and Guguletu, who had just returned from mid-year holidays, boycotted classes and demonstrated.
“The prefect says all the students must go on the field, on the sports grounds … only to find out in fact the senior students had already written the placards, ‘Release Mandela’, ‘Away with Afrikaans’, ‘We are sympathising with Soweto,'” Tapepe Makubalo, a Langa High School pupil at the time, told researchers.
Police action against the students triggered widespread destruction of administrative offices, beer halls and bottle stores. On that day an estimated 27 people, all adults, were killed.
The first student believed to have died was the promising young boxer Xolile Mosi shot dead by a police constable outside Langa High School on August 12. Unlike Hector Petersen, whose death has come to symbolise the June 16 student protests, researchers have found it difficult to trace Mosi’s family.
“We have no idea where his parents are living now. His mother was a domestic worker in Pinelands,” said UCT political science professor Jeremy Seekings
The first protests started at Fezeka High School in Guguletu where today’s pupils are helping research their school’s involvement in the protests as part of the Sadet project and spread to ID Mkhize Secondary School and Langa High School.
Police dispersed initial marches in the townships and later arrested UCT and UWC students. Later in August pupils in coloured areas joined the protests and Christopher Truter, who had stood on the sidelines of a march on August 25, was killed by police.
By early September the demonstrations moved into central Cape Town.
“We got into Cape Town, in the city centre, and we really got beaten to a pulp there by the riot police … The march to town was about solidarity with Soweto and equal rights,” said Zackie Achmat from Salt River school, aged 14 at the time.
Widespread protests continued until exam time. “The coloured kids went back to school and the African kids didn’t go back to school and Bush [UWC] was closed down. And that was 1976 …” said Achmat.
Sadet will publish its research on “the road to democracy” between 1960 to 1994 in several books and also design teaching material for schools, said Professor Martin Legassick of UWC.