‘I dreamed there was a helicopter flying, flying, and it went straight for my head. A bomb fell. The people around me — all of them — died. And the police came and they told me to take the corpses and stack them. I did that, I did that. When I finished and I looked around there was no one — no trees, no buildings — only corpses, millions of corpses.”
Poppy Buthelezi had this recurring nightmare after she was shot in the back on June 16 1976, the first day of the Soweto uprising. She has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. “I don’t remember the sound of the gun. I remember falling to the ground and a boy came running towards me. I gave him my address and asked him to tell my parents that I was dead. Three days later I woke up in hospital,” she says.
She was interrogated at gunpoint by police, “day and night”, for months while still in hospital. “They wanted to know who our leaders were.”
Buthelezi unbuttons her shirt to show me the scars from the bullet wound. One is on her upper back, where the bullet entered, and the other is just above her right breast, where it exited. Twenty-seven years later they are still a corrugated mass.
“I don’t regret anything about that day because we had started to fight for our rights,” she says. But the after-effects haunted her for years. “I used to sleep in my tracksuit so that I could get away quickly in case they [the police] came for me again. I must have forgotten I was in a wheelchair!”
She is haunted, too, by subsequent neglect. “Our leaders in exile used to send us messages. They told us that when they came back they would do one, two and three for us. But when they did come back they jumped on the gravy train and forgot about us. They never bothered to meet us. We were no longer brothers and sisters who fought hand-in-hand. I can say so much about this — it is hurting, it is hurting.”
The day Buthelezi was shot “it was very cold”, she says. “You could tell that something was going to happen. People were wondering and whispering.”
Meetings to plan the day had been disguised for several months as church youth meetings. On June 16 between 15 000 and 20 000 secondary school students met at different points in Soweto and began marching towards Orlando High School.
“We were writing our biology exam when our student leaders gave us the signal,” recalls Buthelezi. “We stood up in the middle of the exam and joined them. Students were carrying banners that read ‘Away with Afrikaans’. We didn’t want to learn in that tongue in Soweto.”
That protest against enforced teaching in Afrikaans at black schools began a new phase of the popular resistance to apartheid. The chilling imagery of that day turned the international media spotlight on the apartheid system.
“What would have been a peaceful march turned into a bloodbath when we heard that Hector Petersen had been shot,” says Buthelezi. “That’s when we decided that everything we came across that belonged to the government we would destroy. We started throwing stones and burning everything — bottle stores, the municipal beerhalls, Putco buses.” The police responded with tear gas, bullets and dogs.
Buthelezi was shot at 7pm that evening. The township had gone quiet. She was crossing the street from her home to fetch her schoolbooks from her aunt’s house. “A single police car came around the corner and opened fire on me,” she says.
This year Buthelezi had trouble finding a school for her 13-year-old daughter Ayanda. She was rejected by two schools in Johannesburg that said they could not accept her because she was from Soweto. Eventually, a month ago, she was accepted by Forrest High School in Turffontein.
The rejections hurt Buthelezi: “I cried, I cried. I wanted to see my baby mixing with other students. But they [the government] don’t care. That is why I sometimes hate everything.
“Some people say there has been a change in South Africa, but I can’t see it — and I don’t even know where to look,” she says. “The schools in Soweto still have no facilities. If the government was really interested in us they would sit down and talk to us and listen to our needs.”
June 16, says Buthelezi, no longer means what it did for those who were part of the uprising. “Since 1994 this noble day has lost its meaning. Instead of being commemorated in a dignified way it has been hailed as a day of celebration. Celebration for what? The present government is simply undermining and insulting our painful history. For us June 16 will always be a solemn day, the day we changed the face of the revolution, a day of courage.”
Buthelezi has been working in the finance division of Spoornet since 2001. “I have accepted my disability, but when I am alone and I can’t do something small, like hang my own curtains, the emotions come back,” she says. The most difficult part of her life is transport. “I have to beg people for transport and the taxis abuse my condition by trying to charge me more. At the moment I am doing everything to raise funds to buy a car next year.”
And people still try to cash in on her tragedy. “Every June 16 anniversary people come and ask me questions over and over again. I try to be strong, but sometimes I have to go to the bathroom and cry.”
Must she meet the policeman who shot her? Is that part of the healing? “I have never met the cop who shot me and I never want to see him. I took part in the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and that was enough.”
It is the possibility of her dream coming true — of walking side-by-side with her daughter — that makes her life worthwhile, she says. “When I look at my daughter, I remember that I could never carry her on my back when she was a baby. I’ve got the feeling that one day I will stand up and we will go side-by-side, holding hands, to town.”