What the Soweto Uprising still demands of us

Historian Noor Nieftagodien warns that annual celebrations have replaced genuine reckoning with the causes, character and unfinished consequences of June 16th

- Kibo Ngowi

Every June 16th, South Africa holds a party. There’s music, dances and speeches from politicians.

Social media feeds are filled with the same photograph — Hector Pieterson’s body, carried through the streets of Soweto — reposted so many times it has begun to lose its power to disturb.

And then, by the end of June, we have all moved on.

This is what worries Noor Nieftagodien. “Those Youth Days have, by and large, become celebratory affairs,” he tells me, “with very little attention being given to the causes, the character, what happened on June 16th and the consequences of that historic day.”

Nieftagodien is a professor of history at the University of the Witwatersrand, head of the History Workshop and the author of The Soweto Uprising: A Jacana Pocket History, first published in 2014 and now reissued in a revised and updated edition to mark the 50th anniversary of the uprising.

He has spent much of his professional life thinking about 1976 — what it was, what it meant, and, increasingly, what is at risk of being lost as the years accumulate and the commemorations grow louder without necessarily growing deeper.

It is a concern that has sharpened with time. “I’ve been very worried,” he says, “as someone who operates in the field of teaching and researching history but also working in the field of heritage, how little attention has been given in the public domain about these events.”

The revised edition arrives at a particular moment. In 2015 and 2016, the Fees Must Fall movement swept through South African universities and with it came an explicit and conscious reckoning with the generation of 1976.

Students held up posters that referenced the uprising, connecting their own struggle against the cost and character of higher education to the struggles of the schoolchildren who had marched fifty years before. For Nieftagodien, that moment became both a prompt and a lens.