The unfinished business of freedom

Fifty years after Soweto, children in this country can still be denied access to school because of an unfinished bridge, inadequate or poorly built classrooms and public funds diverted into corrupt hands

- Kholeka Gcaleka

In June, this country turns its face towards its young. We always have, since the morning in 1976 when the children of Soweto walked out of their classrooms and into history.

I was not yet born when Hector Pieterson was carried bleeding through those streets. I arrived later, in a Johannesburg that still belonged, by law, to other people. My mother was a domestic worker. I learned early what it meant to grow up in a country that had decided, before I could even speak, what my language, my schooling and my horizon were permitted to be. My identity is what keeps me anchored because it connects me to the struggles, sacrifices and dignity of those who came before me.

That is why the fiftieth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising is not, for me, a date in a textbook. It is the hinge on which my own life turned. The young people who marched on 16 June 1976 were protesting, on the face of it, the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of their learning.

But beneath that grievance lay something far larger: a refusal to accept that the children of the poor should be schooled for servitude. They were demanding an education worthy of their humanity. They paid for that demand in blood.

I am a beneficiary of what they bought. The domestic worker’s daughter became an advocate, then a prosecutor and now the public protector of the Republic. I do not recount this to celebrate a personal journey.

I recount it because every door that opened for me was first forced open by teenagers with placards who were younger than many of the students whose complaints now cross my desk. I carry their names into this office.