The greatest debt we owe for our democracy and the freedom we enjoy, though not yet complete, is owed to the children and young people of this country.
It was their audacious confrontation with the mighty apartheid state that strengthened the spines that had been weakened by the Sharpeville Massacre and the banning of the liberation movements in the 1960s.
It was their audacity and the martyrdom of some of them, most notably the 12-year-old Hector Pieterson, that re-energised the global anti-apartheid solidarity movement.
But have we honoured those children enough? Have we ensured that what they put their heads above the parapet for is enjoyed by them or at least their descendants?
I was a 13-year-old child on the morning of June 16. Though young and shielded by the distance of being at school in neighbouring Swaziland (now Eswatini), in 1976, I and many children felt the crushing weight of the egregious massacre of children our age and younger by the apartheid security forces.
Back at home for the August holidays, the streets hummed with an unspoken tension, the shock still palpable. Looking back years later, it occurred to me that it was June 16 that stole my Seventh-day Adventist-anchored childhood innocence. It was then that I began to understand what had necessitated the armed struggle.
The spark behind the June 16 unrest
The decision of the National Party to introduce Afrikaans as the language of instruction in African schools was not the worst element in the architecture of dispossession that had happened to us, our parents and ancestors. It was simply the last straw that broke the camel’s back for the children and young people at the time.
The ubiquitous machinery of apartheid that was unleashed from 1948, culminating in the boiling point on June 16, 1976, followed years of apartheid-styled but not named dispossession, deprivation and oppression using the law under colonialism.
In her book, Apartheid: Britain’s Bastard Child, Helene Opperman Lewis details the laws of dispossession, deprivation and oppression unleashed on Africans even before the Union of South Africa.
Key among such laws was the Glen Grey Act of 1894, which not only stole land but also limited the number of livestock that Africans could own, followed by the 1913 Land Act that left them with less than 8% of the country’s land.
Forced removals continued throughout the apartheid era under various instruments, culminating in the ruthless 1950 Group Areas Act, which continued to enable dispossession right until the 1980s. Thus, when the children and young people erupted in 1976, forced removals and dispossession were still ongoing.
The narrative often only focuses on land, which, though important, is not all that was stolen through the instrumentalisation of the law. Commercial assets such as shops and centres of trading were seized, as outlined by constitutional court judges, particularly Justice Froneman, in Daniels vs Scribante.
Homes were seized, replaced with smaller and less dignified houses and families scattered. The 1913 Land Act, too, had not just stolen land; it took away homes, grazing fields and the freedom to contract as sharecroppers and imposed a blanket proletarianisation of African sharecroppers who, despite having been dispossessed of land ownership, were industrious enough to do well, as documented initially in Sol Plaatje’s 1916 haunting lamentation titled Native Life in South Africa and later in Charles van Onselen’s The Seed Is Mine.
In my social justice teaching under the Constitution, I have come up with a “Rigged Monopoly Game” to help people understand the dispossession and its legacy.
The 1976 generation was already seething over being educated under the Bantu Education Act of 1953, meant to prepare them for permanent white subservience in an economy where, since the Mines and Works Act of 1911 and the Job Reservation Act of 1926, management, professional and artisan jobs were already reserved for white people.
This meant depriving them of the skills to create jobs of their own, as the likes of Charlotte Maxeke, AB Xuma, Pixley ka Isaka Seme and Sol Plaatje, among others, had done. It was the last nail in the coffin, fashioned to make us a permanent proletariat wired to build under white tutelage but never to govern or lead. They called it separate development. But there was neither separation nor development for black people, as they were being required and programmed to serve in white homes, farms and factories and not develop beyond the capacity to serve under white tutelage.
The United Nations did not buy it, declaring apartheid a crime against humanity following the Sharpeville Massacre. The children and young people of 1976 saw through the ruse too and drew a line in the sand. They declared that, like all other children, they had a right to an equal opportunity to be educated to the fullest of their human potential.
A struggle turning point
The weeks that followed, as funerals became rallies and gatherings afterwards became hubs of what were referred to as “umhabulo”, which means conscientisation.
At 13, I was no leader, merely one more face in the crowd, heart pounding with fear and fury, and hiding my face, as others did, to avoid being photographed by newspapers, as that tended to be followed by the security forces.
The democracy ushered in 1994 was not a gift; it was a costly, hard-won covenant. The price included the martyrs of 1976. It also included lives spent wandering in exile, as the song goes: Sabashiy’abazal’ekhaya saphuma sangena kwamanye amazwe lapho kungazi khon’ubaba nomama slande’inkulululeko.
Properly applied, the resulting Constitution was more than law — it was a revolution on paper, a blueprint for undoing centuries of engineered inequality in pursuit of substantive equality and social justice.
The revolutionary potency of the Constitution has been highlighted in various Constitutional Court judgments, key among them being S vs Makwanyane, which not only abolished the death penalty but also solidified the ubuntu value system as foundational to the new constitutional democracy and Minister of Finance vs Van Heerden, which made it clear that, in the absence of reparative action to deal with the structural inequality caused by past legalised injustices, the constitutional promise of equality rings hollow.
Have we left some behind?
Fifty years on, there is no gainsaying that many of the children and young people of 1976 have benefited, particularly from veterans’ support, the country’s vast social assistance system and business support.
But have we dismantled the apartheid structures of exclusion for the benefit of all?
Are we meaningfully inching towards Nelson Mandela’s vision that we would know we had transcended the apartheid legacy when an apartheid farmworker’s daughter finally had the same chances as the farmer’s son?
How come some students are dropping out of university because of a lack of funding or graduating with student debt that weighs them down and undermines equality?
How come many young black innovators struggle to find funding?
We must be honest that those who pursued professional pathways have done better. For example, if you compare my life with that of Palesa Musa, who, detained and tortured as a 12-year-old child in 1976, had her education arrested.
This prevented her from reaping the low-hanging fruits of democracy, giving me, who studied law and helped draft the Constitution and many of the laws that have sought to give it expression in everyday life and social relations, an advantage.
That is why, together with the Thuma Foundation and Stellenbosch University, we chose to name the Marshall Plan-styled process of dismantling the lingering caste-styled racial stratification of our country and its economy — which we have been championing — the Musa Plan for Social Justice. It is intended to remember and make a difference in the lives of people such as Palesa Musa. Additionally, the Thuma Foundation has been supporting Palesa Musa financially since discovering her at Constitution Hill during its dialogue in 2017.
How attuned is the focus on jobs by some parties, without the intention to ensure parity and inclusion in all aspects of the economy, to the rejection of a life of servitude by the 1976 generation?
And what about the millions siphoned into corrupt pockets?
Could they not have made a greater difference?
As I draft policy briefs on transformative governance or lecture on constitutional governance, ethics and social justice, among others, I am always mindful of the debt I owe to the children who dared confront the mighty apartheid state in 1976 and of how my fortunes improved enormously because of their act of courage and hope.
It is our turn to courageously repay the debt.
That conviction is one of the drivers of the #Action4Inclusion campaign, aimed at ending student debt as a barrier to tertiary education. That is not possible without transformative governance that includes reparatory justice and meets all people where they are.
Professor Thuli Madonsela is the director of the Centre for Social Justice, where she occupies the Law Faculty Trust Chair in Social Justice and is the founder of the Thuma Foundation.