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June 16: Don’t let commemorations mangle history
Dinga Sikwebu 16 Jun 2019 00:00

https://t.co/1KEj79atLG

As we have become accustomed, this year’s narrative will not be
different. Broadcast around the country will be the numbing message of
how ‘courageous young people turned the course of history’.
As we have become accustomed, this year’s narrative will not be
different. Broadcast around the country will be the numbing message of
how ‘courageous young people turned the course of history’.

COMMENT
Commemorations are double-edged rituals. On one hand they express the
will to remember, while on the other they are vital political
practices for legitimisation. In the past, commemorating the June 16
uprising was an important tool for mobilisation and collective
political action.

After 1994, the tragic events that took place more than four decades
ago have been appropriated to make claims about who orchestrated the
uprising, to rein in dissident views and pay lip-service to the abject
misery that faces the majority of young people in South Africa today.

In the course of this commandeering of the past, history is mangled
and the independent role of youth is erased.

As we have become accustomed, this year’s narrative will not be
different. Broadcast around the country will be the numbing message of
how ‘courageous young people turned the course of history’. We will
hear little about how the uprising was organised, how it spread, the
duration of the protests, strategic blunders, how the protests ended
as well the role of accidents and unplanned developments in the
evolution of the rebellion. History gets flattened and we miss out how
in Soweto, the Soweto Student Representative Council (SRC) coordinated
the action while in townships there was an aversion to formal
structures and elected leadership.

Like in any uprising, there were events in 1976 that were planned and
there were others that were spontaneous. Unlike the portrayal of a
singular event that we get at commemoration services, the revolt also
went through episodes with ebbs and flows between June 1976 and
January 1977. With the students from Langa, Nyanga and Gugulethu
walking out of their classes in August, ‘Umbumbumbu’ as the struggle
was called went through phases of formulating of demands, galvanising parents’ support and forging non-racial unity with schools outside of ‘black African’ areas. Each of the phases had specific objectives such
as organising the march to the city centre, the two-day worker
stay-away in September, ‘Black Christmas’ and the closure of township shebeens.

Anyone who was either a participant or observer of the student
rebellion in Cape Town would know of the numerous meetings that were
held with parents at Nonzwakazi Methodist church and the Old Apostolic
church in Gugulethu. However acrimonious, meetings were held to garner teachers’ support for the campaign. Winning such support was crucial.
With only four ‘black African’ high school and without parents’
support, the drive to have students who schooled in boarding schools
outside Cape Town return to the city to join the boycott of classes
would have been in vain.

Also never told in the mythologised history, is how throughout the
uprising there were on-going negotiations with authorities and
deputations to the Minister of Bantu Education MC Botha. For an
example, after formulating their demands and with the help of Lagunya
religious Ministers’ Fraternal, the regional director for Bantu
Education DH Owens came on September 28 to a mass meeting at ID Mkhize
high school to negotiate with the Cape Town students.

While not belittling the courage displayed, it is important to
remember that the shock- troops of the revolt were teenagers. Youth
cultures found their way into the uprising. To be a ‘proper comrade’
you had to wear a ‘wild look’ — uncombed hair and untucked shirts. It
is therefore not accidental that the most popular slogans in Cape Town
were ‘Black Power’ and ‘There’s no place like South Africa today’. The 1970s were the era of soul music and the second slogan was an
adaptation of US singer Curtis Mayfield’s album There’s no place like America today, released in 1975.

Whereas the immediate demands were political in the narrow sense of
the word and about the education, the uprising in 1976 was also an inter-generational conflict. Not scarred by repression like their
elders, young people did not spare their parents as they took on the
state and traditional political movements. As the uprising
intensified, their consciousness also grew. The slogan ‘We want our
damn country back’ began to accompany shouts such as ‘Black Power’ and ‘Amandla’. The hymnal song ‘Senzeni na’ morphed as young people added verses about ‘AmaBhulu zizinja/Boers are dogs’ and ‘Sono sethu bubumnyama/Blackness is our sin and crime’.

Old political movements were definitely caught off-guard. Having
convinced themselves that the only way to fight the apartheid system
was through armed struggle, the old political movements cautioned the
youth for wanting to fight the regime with stones. Instead of tapping
into the energies of young people to build a mass movement inside the
country, the student movement was seen as a recruitment ground for
liberation armies.

Equally, parents were bewildered. They could not understand the
rebelliousness of their children. They could only find partial
explanations from verses in the Bible about a prophesied time when
children will rise against their parents. There comes a time, “For a
son dishonours his father, a daughter rises against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are the
members of his own household”.

Although recent scholarly research such as Julian Brown’s The Road to
Soweto and Anne Hefferman’s Limpopo Legacy has tossed out the
presentation of the 1976 uprising as an explosion triggered by the
introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction, there is still
a tendency to give a Soweto-centric version of events. Within days,
the protest spread to different areas of the country. In reached some
townships earlier than others. But more importantly and what the
Soweto-centric narrative misses is that as the protest spread like
wildfire, it took different forms and focused on issues differently.


For an example, the students from Langa, Nyanga and Gugulethu walked
out of their classes in August. The main reason for the walkout was
not the decree that made the use of Afrikaans compulsory. The trigger
was police brutality meted out to students elsewhere. As a response to enquiring parents and written in their placards, the students from the
three townships said; “We sympathise with Soweto”. In his book Place
of Thorns on the student protest, Tshepo Moloi notes: “In Kroonstad’s African township, students at Bodibeng high school demonstrated. But
it was not because of Afrikaans. It was in solidarity with their
counterparts in Soweto and elsewhere in the country”.

Clearly, students from ‘coloured’ and Afrikaans schools who took part
in the uprising did so for their own reasons and as an act of
solidarity. So were students in former ‘homelands’ were the decree on Afrikaans was not applicable. Although the introduction of Afrikaans
may have been the trigger in Soweto, it is therefore important to show
how the roots of the uprising can be found in the general political
awakening amongst youth that goes back to the late 1960s with the
formation of bodies such as the South African Students Organisation
(SASO). Also critical is to show how the rebellion as it travelled, it
took various forms.

In the volume that deals with protests in the 1970s, Thomas G Karis
and Gail M Gerhart point to police reports of rising incidence of
unexplained fires on white farms and sawmills in 1976. In Transkei
and Bophuthatswana, the uprising became entangled with the movement
against the planned ‘independence’ of these Bantustans. Although the “official versions” of the uprising have a straitjacket of one 1976,
the revolt had tributaries.

The history ministerial task team that the Minister of Basic Education appointed in December 2018 to overhaul the history school curriculum
has its job clearly cut out. The team has a responsibility to move us
beyond a ‘patriotic history’ that acts as a commemorative plaque but
to a curriculum that tells the past in more nuanced ways. In dealing
with the 1976 uprising, the story cannot be told by attaching other
centres as an add-on and afterthought. It will have to look at how the
uprising travelled to different parts of the country as well as the
forms it took as it moved beyond Soweto.

Dinga Sikwebu is a co-director for programmes at Tshisimani Centre for
Activist Education. A Grade 9 student in 1976, he took part in the
Cape Town uprising.


Dinga Sikwebu
Dinga Sikwebu is a co-director for programmes at the Tshisimani Centre
for Activist Education. He previously served as the long-time head of
education at the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
(NUMSA). Over the years, he has written and published numerous
articles on politics and the labour movement in South Africa.In 2018,
Dinga served on the adjudication panel for the first People’s Tribunal
on Economic Crime in South Africa.

Source: https://t.co/1KEj79atLG

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