essay about youth day 16 june

South Africa Gateway

Here is a tree rooted in african soil. come and sit under its shade., the 16 june 1976 soweto students’ uprising – as it happened, it took one day for young south africans to change the course of the country’s history. the day was 16 june 1976. here’s an hour-by-hour account of the 1976 soweto students’ uprising..

Young men taunt police photographers in Soweto in June 1976. ( Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising )

Mary Alexander

By 1976 the frustration had been building for a generation. Young black South Africans had become aware that the apartheid plan was to deny them a real education.

Education for ‘Bantus’

Hendrik Verwoerd on the cover of Time magazine, 26 August 1966. ( Time )

In 1953, five years after the National Party was elected on the platform of apartheid, the government passed the Bantu Education Act . This gave the central government total control of the education of black South Africans, and made independent schools for black children illegal.

The aim was simple: ensuring a stable and plentiful source of cheap labour. Black people would be educated only to the point where they were a useful but unthreatening (to white workers) workforce at the foundation of an economy built to only benefit white people.

A notorious quote by Hendrik Verwoerd, a National Party prime minister known as the “architect of apartheid”, makes the intention of the Act clear.

“There is no place for [the black person] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour,” Verwoerd said in a 1954 speech , when he was still Minister of Native Affairs.

“For that reason it is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community while he cannot and will not be absorbed there. Up till now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his own community and partically [sic] misled him by showing him the green pastures of the European but still did not allow him to graze there.”

Before the Act, South Africa had a rich tradition of independent mission schools. The education enjoyed by Nelson Mandela , Robert Sobukwe , Oliver Tambo , Govan Mbeki and many others allowed them to become some of the best minds in the country.

The apartheid government wanted cheap labour, but it also wanted to end the threat posed by bright African minds. Mission schools were closed, and universities such as Fort Hare had their high academic standards chopped to a stump.

A 1976 student’s poster on a fenced-in Soweto school reads: “Afrikaans is a sign of oppression, discrimination. To hell with Boere.” ( Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising )

No education – in three languages?

By 1976 young black people’s frustration with their education, and the bleak future it offered, was ready to explode. The fuse was lit when the government proposed to introduce Afrikaans as the language of teaching.

Black South Africans spoke their own languages. These had already been ignored in their education. English had long been the medium of instruction – their second language – and was a language most urban young black people were at least familiar with. Now the authorities wanted the people they had denied an education to learn a third language.

Two of the many placards produced by students during the uprising (later confiscated and photographed by the police) highlight their antagonism to Afrikaans. The placards were written in English, the students’ second language. ( Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising )

People who speak three languages are considered to be highly educated. These young people, given a rudimentary government education, were getting by in English. But almost none of them knew Afrikaans well enough to be taught in it, let alone write exams in the language.

Afrikaans was also the language of the oppressor. Today most of the people who speak Afrikaans aren’t white , but in the 1970s the language was still associated with Afrikaner nationalism, the ideology of the National Party, the nationalism of white Afrikaans-speaking people.

16 June 1976: 07h00

It’s a winter Wednesday morning, 16 June 1976. The Soweto Students Action Committee has organised the township’s high school pupils to march to Orlando Stadium to protest against the government’s new language policy.

The student leaders come mainly from three Soweto schools: Naledi High in Naledi, Morris Isaacson High in Mofolo, and Phefeni Junior Secondary , close to Vilakazi Street in Orlando.

The protest is well organised. It is to be conducted peacefully. The plan is for students to march from their schools, picking up others along the way, until they meet at Uncle Tom’s Municipal Hall . From there they are to continue to Orlando Stadium .

A photographer in a police helicopter captured this view of the students’ march, before the shooting started. ( Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising )

Students gather at Naledi High. The mood is high-spirited and cheerful. At assembly the principal gives the students his support and wishes them good luck.

Before they start the march, Action Committee chairperson Tebello Motopanyane addresses the students, emphasising that the march must be disciplined and peaceful.

At the same time, students gather at Morris Isaacson High . Action Committee member Tsietsi Mashinini speaks, also emphasising peace and order. The students set out.

On the way they pass other schools and numbers swell as more students join the march. Some Soweto students are not even aware that the march is happening.

“The first time we heard of it was during our short break,” said Sam Khosa of Ibhongo Secondary School. “Our leaders informed the principal that students from Morris Isaacson were marching. We then joined one of the groups and marched.”

There are eventually 11 columns of students marching to Orlando Stadium – up to 10 000 of them, according to some estimates.

There have been a few minor skirmishes with police along the way. But now the police barricade the students’ path, stopping the march.

Tietsi Mashinini climbs on a tractor so everyone can see him, and addresses the crowd.

“Brothers and sisters, I appeal to you – keep calm and cool. We have just received a report that the police are coming. Don’t taunt them, don’t do anything to them. Be cool and calm. We are not fighting.”

It is a tense moment for police and students. Police retreat to wait for reinforcements. The students continue their march.

The marchers arrive at today’s Hector Pieterson Square . Police again stop them.

Here everything changed. There have been different accounts of what started the shooting.

The atmosphere is tense. But the students remain calm and well-ordered.

Suddenly a white policeman lobs a teargas canister into the front of the crowd. People run out of the smoke dazed and coughing. The crowd retreats slightly, but remain facing the police, waving placards and singing.

Police have now surrounded the column of students, blocking the march at the front and behind. At the back of the crowd a policeman sets his dog on the students. The students retaliate, throwing stones at the dog.

A policeman at the back of the crowd draws his revolver. Black journalists hear someone shout, “Look at him. He’s going to shoot at the kids.”

The only picture we have of Hastings Ndlovu is from his tombstone. Here it is used on the information board at the Hastings Ndlovu memorial site in Orlando West in Soweto.

A single shot rings out. Hastings Ndlovu , 17 years old (other sources say 15), is the first to be shot. He dies later in hospital.

After the first shot, police at the front of the crowd panic and open fire.

Twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson collapses, fatally injured. He is picked up and carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo , a fellow student, who runs towards Phefeni Clinic . Pieterson’s crying sister Antoinette Sithole runs alongside. The moment is immortalised by photographer Sam Nzima , and the image becomes an emblem of the uprising.

There is pandemonium in the crowd. Children scream. More shots are fired. At least four students have fallen to the ground. The rest run screaming in all directions.

Dr Malcolm Klein, a coloured doctor in the trauma unit at Baragwanath Hospital, is on his break when a nurse summons him, distress on her face.

“I followed her and was met by a grisly scene: a rush of orderlies wheeling stretchers bearing the bodies of bloodied children into the resuscitation room,” he recalled later. “All had the red ‘Urgent Direct’ stickers stuck to their foreheads …

“I stared in horror at the stretcher bearing the body of a young boy in a neat school uniform, a bullet wound to one side of his head, blood spilling out of a large exit wound on the other side, the gurgle of death in his throat. Only later would I learn his name: Hastings Ndlovu.”

Anger at the killings sparks retaliation.

Buildings and vehicles belonging to the government’s West Rand Administrative Buildings are set alight. Bottle stores are burned and looted.

More students are killed by police, particularly in encounters near Regina Mundi Church in Orlando and the Esso garage in Chiawelo . As students are stopped by the police in one area, they move their protest action elsewhere.

By the end of the day most of Soweto has felt the impact of the protest.

Schools close early, at about noon. Many students, so far unaware of the day’s events, walk out of school to a township on fire. Many join the protests. The uprising gains intensity.

Fires continue into the night. Armoured police cars, later known as “hippos”, start moving into Soweto.

Official figures put the death toll for 16 June at 23 people killed. Other reports say it was at least 200.

Most of the victims are under 23, and many shot in the back. Many more survive with disabling injuries.

The aftermath

The uprising spreads across South Africa. By the end of the year about 575 people have died across the country, 451 at the hands of police.

The injured number 3 907, with the police responsible for 2 389 of them. During the course of 1976, about 5 980 people are arrested in the townships.

International solidarity movements are roused as an immediate consequence of the revolt. They soon give their support to the students, putting pressure on the apartheid government to temper its repressive rule. Many students leave South Africa to join the exiled liberation movements.

This pressure is maintained through the 1980s, until resistance movements are finally unbanned in 1990. Four years later, on 27 and 28 April 1994, South Africa holds its first democratic elections.

Sources and more information

See the South African History Online feature The June 16 Soweto Youth Uprising .

Additional information – particularly the memories of Baragwanath Hospital trauma doctor Malcolm Klein – sourced from “The Soweto Uprising – Part 1” by Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, in chapter 7 of The Road to Democracy in South Africa Volume 2 , published by the South African Democracy Education Trust . Many events omitted from this timeline are to be found in this comprehensive and moving account. The chapter can be downloaded in PDF .

Researcher Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has made a wealth of testimony, photos and documents about the 1976 student uprising available online. Browse her outstanding archive Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising .

Researched and written by Mary Alexander. Updated 30 January 2023. Comments? Email [email protected]

Categories: History

Tagged as: Afrikaans , apartheid , education , Gauteng , History , language , population groups , Soweto

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Commemoration, remembering and memorialising June 16 Soweto uprising

Since the early 1990s, June 16, now known as Youth Day, has been remembered, commemorated, and memorialised as public history. There have been different ways and forms through which the June 16 1976 student uprisings have been commemorated. The Soweto student uprisings have also inspired the production of plays including Sarafina which went on to play on Broadway. Sarafina , a South African musical produced by Mbongeni Ngema depicted students who were involved in the Soweto Student uprising on 16 June 1976. It was adapted into a 1992 film featuring Leleti Khumalo, Mariam Makeba and Whoopi Goldberg as the leading actors.

The new projects of commemorating and memorialising the June 16 Soweto uprising started in the early 1980s. One of the projects involved the construction of a tombstone for Hector Peterson at Avalon Cemetery in Soweto, South of Johannesburg. The construction of the tombstone was carried out by the Azanian National Youth Unity (Azanyu), an internal wing of the then banned Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Hector Peterson’s tombstone was unveiled on 16 December 1981.

Hector Peterson’s tombstone was also a dedication to the memory of all those who died on 16 June 1976 as they are remembered as heroes and heroines who followed the tradition of the South African struggle against apartheid. The tombstone also serves as an inspiration to South African youth, and a constant reminder of what happened to South African youth during apartheid. On the twentieth anniversary of June 16, another memorial stone for young students who died on 16 June 1976 in Soweto was erected. The message on the stone reads, “Ever never again: dedicated to all those who lost their lives on this day and there after 20th commemoration of 16 June 1976.” 

The early 1990s marked more fundamental changes in memory and commemoration making of June 16. In the 1990s, political prisoners were released, liberation movements were unbanned and legalised, many who had been in exile returned home, and negotiation processes started. In 1992, the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) erected a commemorative plaque in Orlando West, Soweto, close to where the shooting of Hector Pieterson took place, and close to the Phomolong Clinic (now known as the Sisulu and Mandela Community Clinic) where Hector Peterson was certified dead.

The commemorative plaque is also close to the home of Mbuyisa Makhubu, the young person, who was photographed by Sam Nzima , carrying the dead body of Hector Person and alongside was Pieterson sister, Antoninette Pieterson, now Antoninette Sithole. The commemorative plaque was erected in honour of South African youth in the struggle for freedom and democracy, as well as in memory of Hector Pieterson and other young heroes and heroines who died for freedom, democracy and peace.  

In 1996, further projects of the memorial of June 16 were in the form of an exhibition of black and white photograph to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soweto uprising. The title of the exhibition was “Youth Uprising – Point of No Return”. The exhibition featured the photographs of Alf Khumalo, Sam Nzima , Bongane Mnguni, Peter Magubane, and Ruth Motau. The exhibition was housed in 11 containers provided by Transnet Company and supported by African Institute of Contemporary Art (AICA). The exhibition was opened on 16 June and ran until 16 July 1996. The exhibition was popular as it attracted both local and international visitors.

In Cape Town, the photograph of Hector Pieterson was temporarily installed on the wall of the Castle of Good Hope. The installation was part of the Faultlines exhibition that opened on Youth Day in 1996, the 20th anniversary of the Soweto uprisings.

In 2002, Hector Pieterson Memorial and museum was opened in Soweto, close to where Hector Pieterson was shot and killed on the 16 June 1976. The Pieterson photograph, taken by Sam Nzima , a photographer at the time for The World newspaper in Johannesburg, became an iconic image of that fateful day, was published across the world.

Another project of June 16 took the form of billboards of children’s portraits in Soweto. The children’s portraits were made by Marcel Tave of the Reunion Republic. The faces that were depicted on the boards were rough imaginations of artists, and at the back of each portrait, the artist wrote the names of the children as well as the dates on which they died. These billboards became an integral part of the space where the commemorative plaque stands prominently, facing the east.

 In 1995, the South African Government officially declared 16 June a national public holiday, in recognition of the sacrifices and contributions of the youth in the struggle against apartheid. Ever since, Youth Day is commemorated every year in South Africa. 

Hlongwane, A, K. (2008). Commemoration, memory and monuments in the language of Black liberation: the South African experience. The Journal of Pan African Studies , Vol.2, No.4, June 2008.|Simbao, R, K. (2007). The thirtieth anniversary of the Soweto uprisings: reading the shadow in Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of Hector Pieterson. African Arts , Vol. 40, No 2, pp52-69. 

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