The epoch-making 16 June 1976 march through the streets of Soweto and many other townships on the Reef, by learners protesting against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction was not an isolated event, as many would like us to believe.
The apartheid authorities had thought that their might in suppressing the liberation movement had secured their power indefinitely.
Mistaken analysts wager that a lull existed when organisations such as the PAC and the ANC were banned in April 1960 and that it was the rise of young people that shook the liberation movement out of slumber.
The fact is that, between 1961 and 1967, the Poqo Insurrection mainly kept white power structures on their toes. More than a thousand of those brave activists were imprisoned for long years on Robben Island Prison, while 95 of them were executed at the gallows. It was no mean feat.
The rise of the Black Consciousness Movement philosophy from 1968 kept the momentum going. Several student leaders, such as Mthuli ka Shezi in 1972, were murdered under suspicious circumstances.
Onkgopotse Tiro’s murder by a parcel bomb while in exile in Botswana brought the gross violations of decent and dignified educational rights into question for the next generation of learners eager to improve their lot.
The bizarre possibility of being killed because you wanted to go to school and be educated was palpable in those years. The onus was on young people to ensure a bright future for themselves or forever become hewers of wood and fetchers of water.
The responsibility to take action could not be avoided.
The year 1976 became our winter of discontent. And when the first spark was lit, it spread like wildfire throughout the country.
We were in the thick of it with my classmates, such as Boyce Bohali, whose elder brother, Joe Nhlanhla, was a leader in exile and Andries Ntseki, whose uncle, Benny Ntoele, had completed 10 years in Robben Island Prison.
I had the knack of interpreting what was going on. I read the Rand Daily Mail and The Star regularly.
I recall that it was easy to mobilise the standard 8, 9 and 10 learners during study hours at our school in Alex.
I explained how the Job Reservation Act would put them at the mercy of an illiterate white supervisor who was paid more than them despite their BA degree in administration.
It was necessary to list indictments such as the lack of adequate school facilities, poor pupil-teacher ratios, overbearing school boards intent on implementing apartheid policies such as the medium of instruction under the Bantu Education Act, a curriculum that had nothing to do with the black experience.
Some of our teachers were university dropouts because of expulsions after protests on campuses. They whispered the vicissitudes of Black Consciousness in the deep and it sank in.
Others, such as our high school principal, Peter Rikhotso, had served three years in Robben Island Prison as a Pan Africanist Congress leader. He had been arrested with his history class students in 1963 in Atteridgeville, Pretoria.
The much-vaunted political vacuum did not exist. Before 1976, the South African Students Movement and the Students Christian Movement encouraged extracurricular activities such as taking learners to leadership training programmes.
June 16 1976 became a spark that grew the critical mass necessary for social change and linked young people to the national liberation struggle.
The township subculture of creative performance and protest poetry did more to draw the interest of students than the conservative teachings of tawdry Western literature in the classroom. It was the pupils who used their talents on protest stages to express their emotions and concerns through poetry and drama.
Oupa Mthimkhulu’s lines, “Year of Fire, Year of Ash” and Makhulu Ledwaba’s haunting stanza, “If the freedom I yearn for lies buried under the tree, I will use my bare hands to dig it free” were met with applause by crowds at rallies.
Ingoapele Izak Madingoane rose out of the blue to become the 1976 generation’s poet laureate with his poem, Afrika My Beginning and Africa My Ending.’ He kept the fires burning.
There were many who left the country to take up military training, inspired by works of art and poetry performances that urged the youth to become agents of change.
Protest begets protest. Successive eras, such as the rise of the comrades in the townships in the 1980s, owe their valiant push to the generation that came before them.
The youth of 1976, in hindsight, became an iconoclastic generation of freedom fighters worthy of commemoration today.
Jaki Seroke is the deputy president of the Pan Africanist Congress.