‘It’s still a living reality’ The Soweto uprising, 50 years on

The day of 16 June 1976 began peacefully in Soweto. Student leaders at high schools across the sprawling Johannesburg township, to which the apartheid regime had exiled hundreds of thousands of black South Africans, took charge of the morning assemblies.

- By Rachel Savage SOWETO

They led their fellow students into the streets and began to march towards Orlando stadium.

The students were protesting against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Their teachers barely spoke the white minority language and the students did not want to learn the oppressor’s language. They were tired of the intentionally substandard Bantu education, tired of being second-class citizens.

“Our worst-case scenario, of course, was that they were going to throw cans of teargas at us,” said Sibongile Mkhabela, then an 18-year-old pupil at Naledi high school and one of the organisers.

As the children moved east, more schools joined. By the time the first group reached Orlando West, where Nelson Mandela had lived before he was imprisoned on Robben Island, the students numbered in their thousands.

The police had a loudhailer, said Oupa Moloto, then a 19-year-old pupil at Morris Isaacson high school. But none of the students could hear what was being said.

The number of people killed that day, which became known as the Soweto uprising, has never been definitively confirmed. The official figure was 23, but some estimates put the death toll at more than 200, according to South African History Online.