The bloody day of June 16,
1976 will remain for a long time an open wound in the hearts of South Africans.
The Apartheid regime deployed a brutal repression of a protest led by ten to
twenty thousand Black students from the township of Soweto, near Johannesburg,
denouncing a law imposing Afrikaans as the language of instruction. Police
tear-gassed, beat and even shot the students, killing 176. Nevertheless, the
bravery of the Soweto students marked a turning point in the history of the
Apartheid regime, which then became increasingly contested by Black movements
in South Africa and by the international community.
The township of Soweto, whose
name stands for SOuth-WEstern TOwnships, is at the same time a symbol of the
struggle for racial equality and of segregation. Founded in the 1930s as a
result of segregationist policies, Black residents of Johannesburg were
forcibly moved to townships reserved for Black people, such as Soweto. Such
townships were separated from White townships by a cordon sanitaire, namely a river, a highway, a railroad, an
industrial area, etc. Soweto grew to become the largest Black city in South
Africa, with the advent of mass rural migration. Living conditions were dire,
thus prone to spurring civil unrest. Soweto had very limited economic activity
because it was essentially a residential town for Black people working in
Johannesburg, where they were banned from living. For this reason, the
residents of Soweto were considered “temporary residents” by law until 1976.
The roots of the Soweto
uprising can be traced back to the early years of Apartheid. Although racial
discrimination had been a fact in South Africa since its Dutch and British
colonial days, it was only institutionalized as Apartheid in 1948, following
the election of the National Party (which, interestingly, strongly inspired
itself from Canada’s own Indian Act.)
In 1953, this government took in charge the education of Black South Africans,
which was until then provided by missionaries, by passing the Bantu Education Act. This law, which had
been contested since its beginnings, reinforced segregation in education and
maintained the Black education system severely under-resourced, although it
increased the attendance rate. From then on, Black students were barred from
attending White universities. Black schools were only funded though a tax
imposed on Black South Africans, as opposed to White schools, which had their
place in the national budget. As a result, Black schools became seriously
underfunded and overcrowded, and underqualification rampant amongst teachers.
Nevertheless, many schools for
Black students have been built in the 1970’s, thanks to pressure from the
business sector, which demanded a better trained Black workforce. The increasing
number of Black students attending secondary school fostered the development of
a political conscience amongst the youth, which dynamized resistant groups such
as the South African Student Association, which inspired the movement against
the imposition of Afrikaans as language of instruction.
This tense context led to the
explosion of the anger of the Soweto students, whose revolt was soon joined by
Black students from other poor South African townships. Black labour unions
also supported their movement and continued the fight against Apartheid for the
rest of the seventies.
Today, the figures of Nelson
Mandela and of Desmond Tutu are celebrated worldwide for their capital
contribution to the struggle for an egalitarian South Africa. But we shouldn’t
let the students of Soweto, who sacrificed their youth for the freedom to come.
-Andrea Pavaluca
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