Soweto Uprising: 'The struggle was shaken out of its moribund state'

The Soweto uprising challenged people to mobilise for change, writes Mamphela Ramphele

The Soweto uprising, like many such spontaneous expressions of outrage by oppressed people throughout history, shook the foundations of the apartheid regime. The irony of a powerful military regime being challenged by unarmed school children was not lost on us.

The uprising came as a shock to all of us. Soweto was on fire, with black power salutes piercing the air.

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Young people demanded an end to the gutter education that undermined their future. It was difficult at the beginning to get the details of what triggered the moment and what was happening after the initial shots were fired. Who were the leaders of the student revolt? What was to follow? Was this the beginning of the end of apartheid?

It was tough to get news in that pre-TV era. We relied on our colleagues in the print media — especially people like Bokwe Mafuna, then a freelance journalist at the Rand Daily Mail —to brief us on the unfolding ground-level realities.

This was also the pre-cellphone era.

The flow of news and information was frustratingly slow and patchy.

At the time I was an activist medical doctor at Zanempilo Community Health Centre in King William ’s Town and the Eastern Cape regional director of the Black Community Programmes. Our activism was to demonstrate the practical manifestations of the Black Consciousness Movement. We ran health and community development programmes in poor black communities to promote self-reliance, selfrespect and human dignity.

I was part of a tightknit community of black consciousness activists who were led by the then banned Stephen Bantu Biko. We spent many hours on the day and subsequent days trying to understand what was happening and what it all meant for the struggle for freedom. Was this the pivotal moment for the build-up of a sustainable momentum for change?

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It slowly emerged that the leaders of the Soweto uprising were part of the cohort of high school pupils who had attended leadership workshops the Black Consciousness Movement ran at Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre on the West Rand. The Anglican priest Dale White and his wife Tish led the centre.

The workshops were effective in raising the consciousness of young black people of the power in their hands to refuse to be treated as inferior and to change the racist system. None of us had anticipated that this consciousnessraising process would enable a revolt by high school pupils that early in the mobilisation process.

The full picture of the brutal retaliation the apartheid government unleashed on young people in Soweto and elsewhere as people rose in solidarity with students will never be wholly known. But the limp body of Hector Pieterson became a symbol of the brutality of a government that had lost all legitimacy.

My sister Mashadi Ramphele was a registered nurse at Baragwanath Hospital where many of the victims of police brutality sought help. She described how nurses would hide injured students in linen cupboards to protect them from arrest. Police broke all the hospital protocols as they searched wards for injured young people in a determined effort to silence the revolt.

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As the revolt spread across the country, the apartheid regime decided to institute a total security clampdown. The Terrorism Act provided a tool for the detention without trial of countless activists.

Mapetla Mohapi was detained and tortured at the Kei Road police station.

On August 5 1976, he became the first prominent Black Consciousness Movement leader to die in detention. He was alleged to have hanged himself with a pair of jeans.

I had the painful task of sitting in on his postmortem.

To add insult to injury, I was one of three of Mohapi’s closest fellow activists who became the first detainees under section 10 of the Terrorism Act in King William’s Town prison, stopping us from burying him. During that time about 20 activists —women and men —were to spend more than four months in that prison.

Other members of our activist community, including Biko, suffered more brutal torture under interrogation as detainees under section 6 of the Terrorism Act.

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Upon our release in late December 1976, the security police acted to scatter the close-knit community over the course of 1977. Many were banned and banished to places across the country. In April 1977, I was banished to the Tzaneen area in Limpopo. Biko was to be detained and tortured to death in September 1977.

Local and international outrage led to the banning of and clampdown on all Black Consciousness Movement-allied organisations, media and individuals. But the spirit of revolt refused to die.

The Soweto uprising shook the confidence of the apartheid regime.

It also challenged and embarrassed fearful, passive adult citizens inside and outside the country to rise up and mobilise for change. The liberation struggle was shaken out of its moribund state. Our society was changed irreversibly after June 16.

The mass democratic movement emerged in the mid-’80s to fill the void resulting from the 1977 banning of organisations and leaders.

The strength of the movement was its inclusiveness: young and old, workers and professionals, faith-based leaders across the spectrum.

Sectarian underground organisations hijacked the movement and broke the solidarity.

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Human rights abuses, including the gruesome necklace murders, scarred our collective spirit.

Making the country ungovernable unleashed public violence, destruction of public property and violent settlement of disputes.

Violence brutalised both victim and perpetrator. The wounds of that brutalisation still fester today. The tragedy is that 40 years on we have yet to meet the demands for accessible quality education.

Our education system is, in the words of Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga, a catastrophe.

Since last year, students have again been demanding radical transformation of our education system to provide accessible quality education fit for developing the talents of 21st-century citizens. Violence has again become the language of those whose voices remain unheard.

We need to reimagine and rebuild our society to become a just, prosperous democracy benefiting all citizens.

- Ramphele is an active citizen