So today we will again sing and dance and listen to speeches extolling the virtues of a generation, a township and an uprising.
The young people in Bafana Bafana should not have been here; instead they should have been at the soccer World Cup in Germany. But that is beside the point.
When the day is over, we will go back to our chores. Some will complain about the inappropriateness of it all: the song and the dance and the absence of ”middle-class” and white youth from these events.
There is no need to be depressed.
All this is what a free youth should do. As long as we keep the memory alive. Working with them, we must continue searching for forms of mobilisation that accord with their lifestyles and preoccupations.
What we cannot ever take away from them is their optimism about the future.
They assert themselves without undue inhibition — in the professions, as workers, in business, in music and the arts, in fashion design and so on.
They may be underrepresented proportionally as registered voters, but never take their civic knowledge for granted.
They may throw us into exasperation about their frames of reference as global citizens, but never underestimate their pride in their country.
Thirty years ago, the events of June 16 confirmed an abiding lesson: for a nation to grow it must at critical moments accept the leadership of the youth.
It is true that the workers’ strikes of 1972/73 and the Madadeni bus boycott of 1975 — among other events — had by 1976 started to rekindle the spirit of resistance after the icy winter of the post-Rivonia period. But it fell to the generation of 1976 fully to strike at the heart of docility.
June 16 was a qualitative leap because it was premised on a boldness that only the naivety of youth can accord. What they lacked in theory, the youth of Soweto made up for in courage and even recklessness.
There in the crucible of defiant protest was life as the real school of politics. After the almost mindless daring of the first few days, better forms of organisation started to emerge — with smaller groups converging on places where protest action was to take place; with attempts to take demonstrations into the city centres; with an appreciation that parents, and more critically workers, had a crucial role to play.
As the uprising quickly spread to other parts of the country, many of us at the University of Natal Medical School, and others who later joined the protests, believed that a week-long national strike could bring the regime to its knees. Later, the demand was for skills to return fire with fire. And when those who left the country arrived in Maputo, in Dar es Salaam, in Luanda and elsewhere, we wanted just the gun. Strategy and theory were not for us, we argued.
But the political growth never stopped. Inside and outside the country the June 16 generation learnt about the mutually reinforcing tenets of black pride and inclusive nationalism; the African National Congress’s approach to struggle; the depth of analysis provided by the South African Communist Party — and a sharpness that attracts rather than invective that repels.
To this day the learning has never stopped, and it dare not stop.
There is something about the June 16 generation that will stand out for posterity, bequeathed to the militants that came after them: the death-defying courage that seemed to grow with rising danger; the thirst for knowledge, even if it meant learning by rote quotes from Marx and Engels, Fidel Castro, Agostinho Neto, Amilcar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane, Oliver Tambo, Michael Harmel, Mark Shope and Jack Simons … who cared? The sense would untangle itself later.
In time, this developed into a principled militancy and an approach to politics so nuanced in its sophistication that the generation of 1976 became the seed of the revival of the 1980s. Something had to give: the enemy could no longer rule in the same old way.
And where are the soldiers of June 16 today?
The fortunes of a comrade from the camps come to mind. About eight years ago he was a commander in the units that went into Lesotho under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community to quell the soldiers’ uprising. Thereafter, I’m told, he was leading the South African National Defence Force contingent in Burundi.
Recently an MP from that generation lamented its silence in the current political debates. It appears, he said, as if the generation was being bypassed by history: the discourse seems to be about, or to involve, only those in their 20s and 30s, on the one hand, and those in their 60s on the other.
A comrade in the Congress of South African Trade Unions from that generation deplores the ascendancy of diatribe as a proxy for political debate.
An acquaintance of the same generation in journalism decries media focus on personalities. But what can we do, he argues — because we have to sell newspapers!
The other day I met a former public-service colleague, now in business, wandering in his Porsche Cayenne. We attend meetings to make deals, he says, but have very little opportunity to exercise our brains.
And so the June 16 generation is to be found everywhere. But it would do well to ask itself: do we still possess the daring that took a nation to new heights?
It can yet redeem its glory: by spiking the guns of senseless politics; by investing in productive activity and creating more jobs; by infusing working-class militancy with a capacity to lead rather than antagonise the rest of society; by excelling in the professions and placing South Africa at the cutting edge of human development; by intensifying the fight against HIV/Aids; by sharpening creativity and originality in music and the arts; and so on.
Indeed, that generation will have redeemed itself if, in its leadership of the soccer fraternity, it ensures that in 2010, it is impossible to celebrate June 16 in the standard format because Bafana Bafana will be doing well in the soccer World Cup.
That should be our pledge to the martyrs of the 1976 uprising, now that the innocence of youth has abandoned us.
Joel Netshitenzhe, head of the policy unit in the Presidency, writes in his personal capacity