Conversations and Soliloquies: A Window on South Africa

By Maurice Hommel

In the midst of apartheid in South Africa, journalist Maurice Hommel documented the cruel injustices and tensions running rampant within the country. What he saw forever impacted his life.

Conversations and Soliloquies presents a collection of Hommels essays and articles from the last fifty-five years, documenting and analyzing South African history during and after apartheid. Over time, the essays illuminate, in sometimes graphic detail, the anti-apartheid struggle that defined South Africa for decades.

Beginning with the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, Hommel delves into the bloody history of apartheid and traces how it pervaded every segment of society. His interviews with prominent South Africans, including Desmond Tutu and Neville Alexander, offer intimate glimpses into the thoughts of those working for change. In addition, stark photographs capture the emotions of the time.

In its breadth of historical perspectives, this collection is a significant contribution to an understanding of South Africas evolution to a nonracial, nonsexist, democratic country. Although lingering prejudices and smoldering resentments remain, Hommel carries an unshakable optimism of South Africas enormous potential. Conversations and Soliloquies captures that hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781462084074

Maurice Hommel

Maurice Hommel was a founding member of the now defunct South African Non-Racial Union of Journalists and its first national treasurer. He was also an executive member of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee. Hommel has a doctorate in political science and has taught at universities in Canada, South Africa, and the United States.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Maurice Hommel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4620-8405-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-8406-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-8407-4 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011963521

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 02/13/2012

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

About the Author

SKU-000508622_TEXT.pdf

Copyright © Collection of Articles: Maurice Hommel

Poems and Quotations: individual Authors

INTRODUCTION

A people desiring to emancipate itself must understand the process of its enslavement.

Willem van Schoor

This work has its genesis in a time that goes back to 1959. That was when I published my first article in a Johannesburg newspaper. Over the years I plied my trade as a journalist and published in papers and other media in places like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, New Delhi, Bucharest, London, Canada and the USA.

Now I have taken what I consider to be the most enduring pieces for publication in a book:

Conversations and Soliloquies: A Window on South Africa.

Conversations when you read me. Soliloquies, my articles, me thinking aloud. But I do not want, like D.H. Lawrence to weep like a child for the past. And to remember what L.P. Hartley famously wrote: The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there. Nonetheless, the past has a contemporary significance. And while the book may seem to present images that appear as reflections in separate distorting mirrors, this is not the case.

It is, in reality, a hike down memory lane. A kind of walking tour through the South African landscape where beauty, ugliness, poverty and immense wealth still reside cheek by jowl. The hope is that history may teach us something.

I did not intend for this book to be a polemic or a diatribe. And certainly not a rant. There are no blind spots. Only words like Sharpeville and Soweto lodged in the national psyche. The book juxtaposes articles of very different sorts.

The select pieces in the book are not placed in chronological order, but positioned so as to give the reader a sampling of events relating to the history of South African politics. As such each article is a snapshot of a time in history which gives a picture of South Africa, what it was in the past, and how certain events and people shaped the country. It is not a textbook, but rather a collection of some of the nation’s most pivotal turning points. The reader may thus pick and choose at his or her will, where to start and when to conclude.

Call this a journalism book, and me a dissident and activist reporter, with a dash of vinegar in many of the pieces. Articles that speak to the politics of liberation, discontent and frustration that still washes over the country.

For me value-free journalism is a myth, but a convenient one since it considers defence and illustration of the status quo as objective. To question or to condemn the dominant system is to be ideologically motivated. But it is always politics that underpins the questions asked. If I make no enemies should I question the worth of my reporting?

It is a book of disparate pieces. The reader may start with any article first but once all have been read, will find the connection. And the stories, especially the Sharpeville and Soweto ones, will never disappear into the quicksand of time.

In this restive, despairing time, the stories strive to give a hint of the flavour, colour and quality of life at the time. It tries to shine a light on the problems and anxieties that impacted people’s lives and illuminate the nature and significance of the period. Writing can’t correct human injustice but it can show it, and it can seed ideas and wake up dormant minds. A good reporter provides detail and paradox. I have tried to provide both.

While compiling this collection I remember what James Baldwin wrote in his book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: My memory stammers, but my soul is a witness.

Living under apartheid was like living in a maelstrom day after long day. During that time South Africa was a country of spectacular tensions. A time when media owners and their editors behaved malevolently towards journalists of colour. And there were only a very few of us, anyway. Those with power are always cruel to those without.

Apartheid’s whore-like visage had become a poisoned chalice. And the toxicity of its legacy even today exudes a suffocating stench. For it was a country where blacks cleaned toilet bowls and scrubbed kitchen sinks, carried trays, mopped floors, collected night soil buckets, and lived in accommodations that lacked heat and inside plumbing. It had become a place where people of colour were treated with so corpulent a contempt as to make of their lives, a humiliating burlesque. For me it was always difficult to believe that apartheidists were unconscious of the violence they were doing to the faith and feelings of the black population.

Ronald Segal, editor and publisher of the international quarterly, Africa South, December, 1956, in an editorial, In Sight of the End, wrote, oppression is never proper, whatever clothes it wears. And that, tyranny in South Africa needs only to be bleached to be democratic. Few countries in the world were so singularly identified with race and colour. And few countries have inspired such deep moral, cultural and political ambivalence among its citizens.

The duty of a writer is to tell the truth. A Chinese proverb says that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. This book in a very small way, is an attempt to resurrect the sight and sounds of periods long past. Ruminative in content because there is so much to reflect upon. Readers are urged to regard this work as an enthusiastic invitation to look over my shoulder and see things they may have missed earlier in a land now euphemistically dubbed The Rainbow Nation. In South Africa emancipation and regression have often been conjoined but never quite so vertiginously as in the nation that Mandela helped to create and sought to prevent. And where we now have a society that remains vibrant with inequalities.

In 1990 President F.W. de Klerk disavowed apartheid. Mandela was released on February 2, 1990, and became President of a non-racial, democratic South Africa in May of 1994. Then, as if by magic, the country became a boulevard of endless hope and opportunity. And then almost just as suddenly, one of disillusionment. As the years slipped by, the boulevard became littered with broken dreams. Sadness and anger. In upscale neighbourhoods gated communities abound in all their gilded splendour. Yet covered by an invisible blanket of fear of what might come next. Security gates are as plentiful as flies in a stable. The jarring incongruities of the reforms remain. So we weep and we hope.

After 17 years of democracy few illusions remain. A society increasingly divided between rich and poor cannot hold. Epochal change did not take place after 1994. The country’s new rulers fell head over heels in love with the market mechanism without scrutinizing the limitations of the mechanism. And Casino Capitalism became a permanent part of the package.

In 2011 many of the most distressing problems are deeply economic in nature. And in the vast shanty towns that now embrace several South African cities, thousands suffer atrociously and die quietly. We know that it was circumstance that imposed the shanty towns on people who reside there. But these people must be brought back and given a place in the lives of better-off South Africans. In civilized society the less fortunate are not shut away from the more fortunate.

The handicapped are not forgotten and the lucky realize that there is much to be gained from living up to their obligation towards others. This is the habit of humanity, and all South Africans must want to acquire it and to remember that welfare is not a gratuity, but an entitlement. If not, the pot of social unrest will remain on boil. While reflexive racism is still universal throughout the country, the need for government that is faithfully empathetic to the millions who remain marginalized becomes more accentuated.

The end of apartheid shaped a welter of dynamic and volatile events without ever being able to control them. The negotiations did compromise many of the ANC’s cherished ideals. For one, it did nullify the Freedom Charter. At the end of it, no clear programme inimical to the existing political and economic system had emerged. To function in a modern democracy such as South Africa has now become, citizens must understand the country’s past. To nurture it will enable us to give a vital thrust of intention into the future.

If South Africa has a history to celebrate, it lies in the political and social movements like the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, South African Communist Party, Non-European Unity Movement and B.C.M. that made the country an example to the world. And although new grievances to nurture still exist, future prospects for the country are considerable.

Happiness and contentment are not commodities. At the end of a long and brutal occupation by apartheid it is now a human right for all South Africans. So I urge—Grab a Dream and Fly.

September 1, 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful thanks to: Gwendoline, Natasha, Tania-Lisa, Meghan (a.k.a. Mercedes), Brandon, and Maxi.

For lending a hand and a heart.

Also, Astral Poole, librarian extraordinaire, and Mohammedsajid Patel for technical support.

In this work I have used images I think can help clarify the material, and quotations that assist in better understanding. I have tried to thank everyone, but I may have missed some to whom I also owe thanks. For such omission, I sincerely apologize. Some of the images are courtesy of Sechaba, official organ of the African National Congress of South Africa, London office; Pan-Africanist Congress Observer Mission to the United Nations, New York; Zimbabwe African National Union publication.

Chapter 1

Milestones to 1994

Notebook:

When I first conceived the idea of assembling my Reporter’s Notebook, there was no hesitation that the stories about the massacres in Sharpeville and later, Soweto, should come at the beginning. Both happened at a time when apartheid seemed destined to forever plague and torment the country and its people.

Both conflicts had international dimensions. They represented a decisive stage in the anti-apartheid struggle. Both Sharpeville and Soweto were an expression of defiance against the ruling, racist South African regime and became emblems of black resistance and solidarity. The trenchancy of these events kept the pot of social unrest on the boil until the coming of Nelson Mandela.

And, however, imperfectly realized, the revolutionary impulse did change forever the way in which black South Africans viewed their society and its politics. The birth-pains of a new era were beginning to be felt across the country.

The Sharpeville Massacre:

The name that lives in infamy

In Sharpeville, in the space of 10 to 30 seconds, police killed 69 people and wounded 200 who were not armed.

Sharpeville will always be the name on the tombstone of what was once upon a time the apartheid state of South Africa. Tomorrow, the nation of South Africa will pause and remember anew Sharpeville, the name of the dusty African township some 70 kilometres south of Johannesburg where it happened 40 years ago on March 21, 1960.

pic1.jpg

Sharpeville—The beginning of the end

It was here where, in the space of 10 and 30 seconds, 69 people were killed and 200 wounded. Examinations showed that most of the dead and wounded, which included women, men and children, had been shot in the back while running away. On the same day in nearby Vanderbijl Park two black men were also gunned down by police. And in the townships of Nyanga and Langa on the outskirts of Cape Town, five people were shot dead and several wounded.

White government came close to collapse

The events of March 21 reverberated around the world and quickly focused international public opinion against apartheid in ways that had not happened before. The white government came as perilously close to collapse as it had ever come. Huge sums of foreign capital flowed out of the country and the pass laws against which the demonstrations had taken place were suspended temporarily.

The demonstrations against the pass laws had been called for by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), an organization formed in 1959 when an important and influential group of black activists led by a former Methodist lay preacher and university teacher Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe broke with the African National Congress (ANC) over policy and strategy on how best to combat the all-white apartheid state.

Pass system was regarded as linchpin of apartheid

The PAC launched its Positive Action Campaign at its first and only national conference in Johannesburg on Dec. 20, 1959. The pass system was chosen carefully because it was regarded as the linchpin of apartheid. It showed no respect for the sanctity of marriage. Wives and husbands often became separated forcibly when one or the other was unable to obtain a pass to enter the same area. Children over the age of 16 needed special permits to live with their parents outside of specially designated black reserves called Bantustans. The pass system also denied African workers the right to sell their labour to whom they chose. Every African woman and man required a special permit to seek employment outside a Bantustan or face deportation within 14 days.

pic2.jpg

Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe

1925-1978

Founder President of the PAC

At the launching of the campaign against the pass laws, PAC president Sobukwe said: The issues are clear-cut. The PAC has done away with the equivocation and clever talk. The decks are cleared because in the arena of South African politics there are today only two adversaries—the oppressor and the oppressed. The master and the slave.

Sobukwe, himself, was put on trial and sentenced to three years on Robben Island, the maximum security prison where Nelson Mandela had spent 18 years of his more than 27-year incarceration.

Sobukwe’s three years stretched into nine years in solitary confinement on the island, without another court appearance. The minister of justice at the time said that Sobukwe would be kept locked up, if necessary, until hell freezes over. After nine years Sobukwe was banished to the diamond mining town of Kimberley, hundreds of kilometres from his hometown. He was kept under house arrest until his death in 1978 at the age of 54 under mysterious circumstances.

The PAC campaign urged all Africans to leave their passes at home on March 21, march to the nearest police station and demand to be arrested for refusing to carry a pass, which had been euphemistically called a reference book since 1953 when the government passed the Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Native Documents Act.

The crowds at Sharpeville and the other three townships were described as mostly in a festive mood, unarmed and with no displays of violence. They chanted freedom songs and campaign slogans like Izwe lethu (our land) and Awaphele ampasti (down with passes).

By 11 a.m. on March 21, the crowd outside Sharpeville police station had grown to more than 10,000 chanting and singing demonstrators. But within minutes of allowing the PAC leaders into the station to present themselves, the police outside, without prior warning at all, started firing into the crowd.

That temporary suspension of the pass laws by the government in the immediate aftermath of Sharpeville came to an abrupt halt at the beginning of April, when the apartheid regime declared a national state of emergency and arrested more than 18,000 people. A curfew was imposed and press censorship was introduced in effect, if not in fact. Liberal organs, such as Fighting Talk and New Age, were banned as were the leaders of the Non-European Unity Movement, including the editor of its weekly newspaper, The Torch, which meant that it, too, had to shut down. The General Post Office was ordered to stop delivering copies of the Liberal party organ Contact.

In 1960, both the ANC and the PAC were proscribed. The outrage of the international community became manifest and, for the first time, apartheid was brought up at the United Nations Security Council, which called for the South African regime to initiate measures aimed at bringing about racial harmony based on equality… and abandon the policies of apartheid and racial discrimination.

The Sharpeville massacre, as it was referred to in U.N. documents, marked a turning point in the Security Council’s consideration of South Africa’s apartheid policies. From that time on, the council overrode the white government’s argument that its apartheid policies were matters of domestic jurisdiction and held that the racism involved was a development that related to international peace and security.

In the years that followed, Sharpeville became both the inspiration and the catalyst for other significant developments within the resistance movement. The militant black students movement, which operated under the name of SASO (South African Students Organization), led by a young medical student by the name of Steve Bantu Biko, dubbed March 21 Liberation Day. The name proved to be more than apt.

And so, tomorrow and on all other March 21st days to follow, South Africans will again remember with passion, Liberation Day.

Although the anger and pain have mostly subsided, remembrance for South Africans in their new, non-racial democratic country will always be a continuing, cleansing experience.

The Toronto Star

March 20, 2000

A Cowardly Act. Biko Dead at 31

SASO became the incubator of an even more powerful force, a Black Consciousness movement, which spread like wildfire throughout black townships and campuses. The movement provided a trenchant critique of white power and privilege in South Africa. But this new assertiveness quickly awakened fears in the security forces, which went after Steve Biko,a young medical student, and his followers with a deadly vengeance.

On September 12, 1977, Steve Biko, the founder and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, died a terrible death. His legacy and stature, however, have grown enormously and his ideas and thoughts are now a permanent part of the South African vocabulary.

Pic3.jpg

Biko-He died for his beliefs

The events leading up to Biko’s death had their genesis in the political climate of the 1960s. A time when the apartheid regime believed that it had finally pacified the internal resistance movement. The African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Communist Party, had been proscribed, their leaders either in exile or incarcerated.

It was a time when the police overruled their own rule of law. When they inflicted their brand of punishment without regard as to whether a person was innocent or guilty. As the hired mercenaries of apartheid they spent their working hours nailing down the mountain of apartheid laws on a resentful populace. Ronald Segal, publisher and editor of Africa South, described it as Work that meant violence, because its goal was a brutal negation of civilized concepts, and a forcible and unnatural stifling of human decency.

The celebrated South African author, Harry Bloom, reflected on this period: There are too many cracked bones, bruises, missing teeth, weals—and gravestones—in the townships and locations to avoid the conclusion that torture and assault are more or less routine procedure in the police stations throughout the country.

According to Biko, at the heart of the new thinking was the realization that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. The philosophy of Black Consciousness emphasized that mental emancipation was the precondition for political emancipation. In his book of essays, I Write What I Like, Biko says, We must remove from our vocabulary completely the concept of fear. Truth must ultimately triumph over evil. For a once cowed populace, Black Consciousness quickly fanned the flames of black nationalism.

On August 18th, 1977, Biko was arrested at a roadblock near the town of Port Elizabeth. He was not charged with a crime but held incommunicado under section 6 of South Africa’s notorious Terrorism Act for the purpose of interrogation. Kept shackled and naked for much of the time, he was fed a diet of mostly dry bread and water.

After several days of interrogation, still naked and shackled, Biko was put into the rear of a flatbed van and driven through the night, in the heart of winter, some 600 miles to Pretoria. On September 12th, 1977, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, not quite 31 years old, died in a Pretoria jail.

The renowned British neuro-pathologist, Sir Charles Symonds, examined the body at the request of the Biko family. He concluded that Biko died of a blow or blows to one side of the head causing severe brain damage.

On September 14th, then Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, informed members of his ruling National Party that Biko had died. He said, I am not sad, and I am not sorry about Mr. Biko’s death. Dit laat my koud (It leaves me cold). Kruger then agreed with a fellow delegate who congratulated the Minister for having allowed Biko his democratic right to starve himself to death.

In the 18 months preceding Biko’s death, 20 other black people also died while in police custody. And while the actual Biko inquest was in progress, an 18-year-old detainee, Bono Ventura Malza, also died.

Biko’s articulation of the philosophy of Black Consciousness, had its share of detractors within the resistance movement. In his book Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela criticizes BC for advocating a non-racial society while excluding whites from playing a role in achieving such a society. He acknowledges, however, that after the banning of the ANC, the PAC, and the Communist Party, BC filled a vacuum among young people.

An inquest in 1977 exonerated the white policemen accused of killing Biko. Justice ministry officials made a decision not to prosecute, ostensibly because of insufficient evidence.

Biko’s widow, Ntsiki, went to the Constitutional Court (the equivalent of the United States Supreme Court) in an attempt to prevent the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from beginning its work. Her argument: the amnesty procedure of the commission presided over by three judges, denied her the constitutional right to justice by indemnifying her husband’s murderers against standing trial.

The court, however, accepted the South African government’s arguments that only an offer of amnesty would draw apartheid murderers out of the wood work. The Theory—knowing the truth and forgiving the perpetrators, would have an effect on reconciliation.

The decision must also have come as a jolt to TRC which, under the chairmanship of Desmond Tutu refused to grant amnesty to police officers. Aware that the Biko family had vowed never to give up trying to bring the killers to justice, the officers came forward twenty years later, in June 1997, and confessed to the killing. They claimed that it had been an accident. Biko, they said, had become agitated while under interrogation and they had tried to restrain him.

The TRC was made up of seventeen members, all hand-picked by President Mandela. It had come about as a consequence of the Promotion of the National Unity and Reconciliation Act signed into law on May 19th, 1995, by the President. Among its objectives—to facilitate the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of all relevant facts associated with a political objective. Another was the restoration of moral order, to seek the truth and to prevent the shameful past from happening again.

At the end of 1988, I spoke with Archbishop Desmond Tutu at his official residence in Bishop’s Court, Cape Town. He said he had been a member of the National Forum which embraced the Black Consciousness type of thinking. Here, in his own words, the Anglican Archbishop: I see myself as an exponent of Black Theology which can be subsumed under the BC label. Tutu added that BC had made a significant contribution to the black struggle against apartheid.

Few historical events have inspired so much controversy and debate as the manner in which Biko died, and the developments in its aftermath. And, however imperfectly realized at the time, Biko and BC provided a virtuoso polemic against apartheid and racism in South Africa. Fearlessly and sincerely it did change dramatically and fundamentally the way in which young black South Africans viewed politics and society. And if there is any consolation at all to be had from the final resolution of the Biko story, it is that the truth in this case, can never be airbrushed.

Humankinds Magna Carta

After March 21, 1960, human rights became a fiercely pressing concern of all disenfranchised South Africans. And became, like never before, a permanent part of the common public vocabulary. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by 48 states out of 58 in the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, South Africa abstained. Today there are 192 members and still there is no universal consensus on exactly what constitutes human rights.

In spite of this the Declaration stands as one of the international body’s greatest achievements. Eleanor Roosevelt, first chairperson of the General Assembly’s Commission on Human Rights, described the document as the Magna Carta of Humankind. Pope John II, hailed it as the conscience of mankind.

The Declaration, which has been translated into the main languages of the world, ranks second only to the Charter of the United Nations as the index of the highest aspirations of the civilized world. Protection of human rights is now a world-wide concern. The one abiding interest that transcends all disinterest, all divisive ideologies should, in truth, be human rights. In practice it should stand unchallenged as the cherished concern of all people.

World interest in the subject is not new and fairly sustained. It is unfortunate, however, that the concept itself has remained a wilfully deceptive cliché, an illusory goal and, for the most part, a mere shadow in the minds of the nations of the world.

Fifty six years after the framing of the Declaration, vastly differing perceptions of what constitutes human rights, exist among many member states. This dichotomy of what is called the two baskets of rights is especially strong between the inhabitants of the southern and northern hemispheres. The roots of this problem could be in the original Declaration itself. Because it was originally intended to be only a prelude to an international bill of rights, the Declaration is hortatory: it is not an enforceable code.

Many of the rights enunciated in the Declaration reflect the philosophy of the modern welfare state. The right to social security, to work, equal pay for equal work, to form trade unions, to rest and leisure, to maternal and infant care, and an adequate standard of living.

Thus the Declaration reflects in the main, the attitudes and institutions of the Western developed countries. Drawn up before the proliferation of newly independent countries, particularly those in Africa, these countries find it hard to adapt many of the esoteric guarantees of the Declaration to a society frequently beset by great poverty and starvation.

The observance of human rights within a Western perspective has long been the requirement of economic assistance to the developing countries. The USA adheres to such a policy and so do several international agencies which draw a substantial part of their finances from the American treasury. For the developing countries it is this predominance of investment criteria over human rights that is of great and immediate concern.

Globalization (read unfettered capitalism), has exacerbated these concerns. Even in South Africa. In 2002, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights reported that the institutions of globalization have not yet seriously addressed the issue of human rights. Globalization has caused inequality and discrimination. The situation has not changed.

And so if the anatomy of human rights is not to remain a mystique, the formless hope of the world’s poor and underprivileged, then it needs to be re-examined urgently because the essence of human rights is democracy. And democracy is choice: freedom of choice demands dissent, diversity, difference—all the contradictory counsels through which a majority arrives at a decision. Through public debate by Press, radio, television, and meetings of parties and organizations.

In South Africa itself a firm commitment to human rights promises to serve both moral and practical ends. It would aid those who demand that all the promises of democracy be fulfilled. To proclaim that the rights of all depend on the rights of each. And not to suffer without action the slightest invasion of liberties in the conviction that to tolerate one is dangerous to all.

An excerpt from a longer article.

Cape Times,

March 19, 2004

Lest We Forget: Soweto Student Revolt 1976

pic4.jpg

Black students march for a better education

All nations remember their history through a variety of signs, symbols and images. Looking back on the past without anger can be both cathartic and uplifting. The great Latin-American humanist and writer, Carlos Fuentes, in his book Latin America: At war with the past, wrote: The knowledge of past is the possibility of shaping an imperfect but reasonable future. If we understand that we made the past, we will not permit a future without us or against us.

June 16 is Youth Day in South Africa. On this day the country solemnizes the Soweto Student Revolt of 1976 when 170,000 students between the ages of 10 and 20 in the black township of Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg downed their books and took to the streets to demonstrate their opposition to instruction through the medium of Afrikaans.

What happened on that fateful day had its genesis in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, specifically designed to deprive the most vulnerable sector of the population—the black child—from obtaining a modern, free and enlightened education. A policy document of Christian National Education upon which the act rested declares: Native education should be based on the principles of trusteeship, non-equality and segregation. The model was the German school system under the Nazis called National Socialistic Education.

The student march which had been planned weeks in advance was to publicly challenge the government to revoke the language regulations in black schools. It was to be non-violent, its destination the Orlando Stadium, the largest sports facility in the Johannesburg area. The first group of students, 15,000 in number, started off at 7 am on a chilly winter morning. Carefree and jovial, they displayed slogans written on cardboard: Down with Afrikaans, Abolish Afrikaans, Blacks are not dustbins.

Informed that the police were approaching, a student leader stopped the column and pleaded: Please brothers and sisters, I beg you, remain calm. Then the police arrived. At first they used batons and teargas. No warning had been issued. Unbelievably, the students refused to retreat and tried to defend themselves by throwing stones. The shooting started. Estimates put the number of students who died at close to 500. Thousands more were injured. The South African Christian Institute said in a report, subsequently banned by the state, that more than 5,000 students had been arrested and 300 detained.

In a determined effort to eradicate and intimidate the student movement the police