Fees Must Fall: Many were born-free. None felt it

On 16 June 1976 twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson was shot by apartheid police on the streets of Orlando West, Soweto.

- NAMHLA MONAKALI

Sam Nzima’s photograph captured what followed: Hector’s body cradled in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister Antoinette Sithole running alongside, her mouth open in a scream that has never really stopped. Approximately 566 learners were killed.

Not yet old enough to vote, to own property, to move freely through the country of their birth. But they understood, with extraordinary clarity, that the system shaping their lives was wrong, and that silence was no longer a form of survival.

Politics were not foreign in my home. I grew up sitting at my grandmother's feet, listening to her describe an era I had not lived but somehow already felt. She sang the struggle songs and I would chant along, understanding the weight. History was not handed to me in a classroom. It lived in her voice.

I carried that into journalism, arriving at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) doing a short course at the time, freelancing for a community newspaper, reading news for a community radio station when Fees Must Fall arrived at its peak.

I documented and interviewed student activists the same age as the children of 1976. Many were born-free. None felt it.

This Youth Day, watching Netflix’s documentary The Trials of Winnie Mandela, which aired in April, I found myself pulled back into that conversation.