What Youth Day won't tell you

Fifty years after the Soweto Uprising, Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni’s Rise ‘76 strips away the ceremony of Youth Day to confront what actually happened to those children on June 16th 1976

- Kibo Ngowi

“Memory is a romantic thing.” These words are repeated at various points of Rise ‘76: The Story of June 16th, now running at the Market Theatre’s Mannie Manim space and they carry a different weight each time.

Playwright and director Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni lifted the phrase from a written testimony by the late Sibongile Khumalo, who had prefaced her own account of June 16th 1976 by warning her interviewer: “Memory is a romantic thing. So please stop me if I start romanticising anything.”

It was just one of many details that Mashifane wa Noni collected during two and a half months of research — university archives, TRC testimony videos, autopsy records, first-hand interviews with survivors — and tucked away in what she calls her “little bank,” unsure at the time of exactly how it would be used but certain that it meant something.

That instinct for the telling detail is everywhere in this production. “I have picked up what I think are only a couple of crumbs,” she told me when I sat down with her after seeing the play on Sunday, its opening day at the Market Theatre.

“But the crumbs do give us an idea of the various flavours of that terrible day.”

Mashifane wa Noni’s great instinct as a dramatist is to resist the gravitational pull of the monumental. She was writing about an event that most South Africans encountered first through a photograph, Hector Pieterson’s body carried through the street and that has since been processed and repackaged, annually, into something called Youth Day.

Her response was to go smaller and more specific, to find the boy inside the icon. It was in a TRC video, she told me, that she first noticed something small and arresting: a woman walking out of her home to give testimony about her dead son had beautiful pink flowers growing outside her front door. That image, grief existing in the same frame as ordinary beauty, found its way into the play.