I have always joked that I am too young to claim 16 June 1976 as my “struggle credential”. I was born in April 1975 in Khuma, a township near Stilfontein in the North West.
When pupils in Soweto took to the streets against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction and against the suffocation of black life itself, I was barely a year old.
Most probably, while history was exploding in Soweto, I was crying for milk, sleeping in my mother’s arms or taking uncertain toddler steps on dusty township streets.
I was not there to smell teargas.
I did not hear the gunshots. I did not run from police dogs. I did not carry placards.
Yet 16 June belongs to me. Not because I earned it but because I inherited it.
That is one of the deepest truths about memory in South Africa: some histories belong to us not because we witnessed them but because we are living inside their consequences.
June 16 lives in our language, our freedoms, our schools, our fears and in the uncomfortable silence that follows whenever we ask whether we have truly honoured those who died.
As I grow older, I find myself less interested in slogans and anniversaries and more interested in the human beings inside history.
What did fear smell like that morning? What courage did it take for children to confront a state armed with bullets? What kind of country forces its children to become revolutionaries?
Perhaps the question that haunts me most is: What does the death of a 13-year-old Hector Pieterson mean to someone who was only a year old at the time?
For years, Hector was simply a photograph to me. A powerful one, yes. The image of a young body carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo while Antoinette Sithole ran beside them became one of the defining symbols of apartheid brutality.
However, with age, fatherhood and reflection, Hector stopped being a symbol and became a child in my imagination. A boy. Somebody’s son. Somebody who laughed, complained, played football, got into trouble, dreamt and irritated adults, as children often do.
When I look at my own children at 13, I realise how impossibly young Hector was. At 13, a child reaches for reassurance. A child imagines adulthood as distant.
Yet apartheid looked at a 13- year-old and saw a threat deserving of bullets.
That changes you when you think deeply enough about it.
Death is not always physical. Death can also be symbolic. It can be the killing of drive. The destruction of hope. The slow suffocation of aspiration.
Hector Pieterson dies daily in the death of dreams. He dies when young people lose faith in education because the system keeps failing them. He dies when graduates sit at home year after year without work. He dies when corruption steals from classrooms, libraries and laboratories. He dies when leaders stop inspiring confidence and start normalising mediocrity. He dies when children inherit hopelessness instead of possibility.
That is the haunting thought I cannot escape: perhaps we are killing Hector daily through our actions, our indifference and our failure to build a society worthy of children.
We often imagine death dramatically, with sirens and funerals, but there is another kind of death that walks quietly among us: the death of potential. The death of belief. The death that happens when a young person concludes that dreaming is dangerous because disappointment is inevitable.
Perhaps that is why 16 June matters so profoundly. I know this not only intellectually but personally.
Years after 1976, during one of the periods when pupils continued to agitate for freedom, I experienced something that remains etched in my memory.
At Borakanelo Secondary School, amid protests and unrest, a policeman struck me with the butt of a rifle. I remember going down. I must have blacked out for a moment because memory breaks there. The next thing I remember is getting up, disoriented, only to receive a kick on my backside for good measure before being forced to run.
To that policeman, I was not human. I was not a child. I was not somebody’s son carrying dreams and fears. I was merely a black body to be controlled.
That is what oppressive systems do. They stop seeing humanity.
Those who romanticise apartheid, who casually speak of “better days”, must understand this clearly: we will never forget. We cannot forget. We carry these memories not because we enjoy pain but because forgetting would dishonour those who paid for freedom with blood, dignity and stolen childhoods.
When I reflect on 16 June, I no longer see a simple story of heroes and villains, though history understandably seeks clarity. Certainly, there were villains: a brutal apartheid regime, policemen who turned weapons on children and leaders who believed black minds had to be controlled and diminished.
The older I become, the more I realise that villainy is not always dramatic. Sometimes villainy is silence. Sometimes it is indifference. Sometimes it is benefiting from injustice while pretending not to notice it.
The heroes? The heroes were not only famous names. They were teachers who encouraged critical thought despite danger. Mothers who allowed their children to march while terrified they might never return. Pupils who discovered courage in one another. Ordinary people who refused to surrender dignity.
Freedom movements are stitched together by ordinary hands.
That is why memorialising struggle matters.
I remember visiting sites in Argentina that preserved the memory of dictatorship and disappearance. They were not merely museums displaying old artefacts behind glass. They were warnings. They confronted visitors with a difficult question: What kind of society do we never wish to become again?
Similarly, whenever I am in Florence commemorating the end of fascism, I am struck by the spiritual weight of a collective promise: never again. It is not merely a remembrance of the past but a haunting moral commitment to resist its return in every form, a conviction I have heard echoed repeatedly by people like Massimo Gramigni and Dino Lorimer.
I leave the countries thinking deeply about South Africa.
Do we memorialise properly or do we merely commemorate ceremonially? There is a difference.
Commemoration can become performance. Speeches. Wreaths. Matching T-shirts. Political slogans.
Yet true memorialisation unsettles us. It refuses comfort. It forces societies to examine themselves honestly, because memorialising struggle is not about glorifying pain. It is about preserving moral memory.
That is why I struggle when I see sites of ancestry and memory neglected or vandalised. Graves forgotten. Heritage sites abandoned. Historical truths reduced to political talking points.
We cannot claim to honour the dead while refusing to protect the meaning of their sacrifice.
We cannot claim to honour the dead while stealing from the poor, normalising corruption, crushing opportunity and stripping the living of their dignity daily.
To truly honour those who sacrificed for freedom is not only to remember the pain of the past but to build a future where hope, justice and human dignity are protected with the same courage that won us our freedom.
A nation without memory becomes dangerous to itself. And perhaps this is where 16 June becomes deeply personal for me as a father, a South African and a citizen trying to make sense of our national tapestry.
How do we create an environment where 16 June is not something “those children” experienced long ago but something belonging to all of us?
How do we ensure that Hector Pieterson is not frozen permanently in a photograph but alive in our moral consciousness?
Maybe it begins by understanding that “we are Hector Pieterson”.
Not literally, of course. None of us can cheaply claim his suffering. But we are connected to him through the unfinished work of building a society worthy of children.
Every child failed by poverty, violence, drugs, broken schools, absent leadership, corruption and despair should remind us that 16 June is not safely buried in the past.
If children carry the heaviest burdens of our failures, then the spirit of 16 June walks among us.
I often think about the courage of young people. Adults romanticise youth while simultaneously refusing to listen to it.
Yet history repeatedly shows that young people are often the first to recognise when societies are lying to themselves.
The pupils of 1976 understood that inferior education was not accidental; it was political. They recognised that language itself could become a weapon.
Today’s young people confront different realities: unemployment, mental health struggles, inequality, digital pressures and violence. Sometimes older generations dismiss them too quickly. But perhaps every generation has its own 16 June moment, its own confrontation with systems denying dignity.
The question is whether we are listening.
As someone born after Sharpeville but before the Soweto uprising, I occupy an unusual place in South African history. I belong to a generation shaped by the aftermath of struggle rather than its front lines.
We inherited freedom’s promise but also freedom’s contradictions. We grew up hearing stories of sacrifice while witnessing inequality survive democracy.
Perhaps that is why 16 June feels less like a completed chapter and more like an unfinished conversation. Maybe that is exactly how it should feel because the danger of memorialising struggle is packaging history too neatly. Turning pain into predictable ceremony. Reducing human complexity into slogans.
Yet our history is not neat. It is layered, contradictory, painful, inspiring and unfinished.It is a tapestry. A tapestry of grief and courage. Of sacrifice and betrayal. Of children who forced a nation and eventually the world, to confront evil.
What moves me most about 16 June today is not only the bravery of those students but the reminder that history pivots when ordinary people refuse humiliation as normal.
Perhaps that is the challenge 16 June leaves us with now. To ask ourselves honestly: What injustices have we normalised? What suffering have we become too comfortable with?
What future generations might one day ask us about with disbelief?
One day, our children will judge us too. They will ask what we did with the inheritance of sacrifice we received. Whether we expanded dignity or narrowed it. Whether we deepened humanity or cheapened it. Whether we merely remembered Hector or whether we built a country where children mattered.
For me, 16 June is no longer simply about a date. It is a mirror held before South Africa. A mirror asking whether we recognise the humanity of our children. A mirror asking whether freedom has become routine rather than sacred.
And perhaps the deepest tribute we can offer Hector and the generation of 1976 is not an annual ritual but a country courageous enough to keep examining itself honestly, because Hector Pieterson must stop dying every day.
Sello Hatang is the executive director of Re Hata Mmoho