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Essay

Setting the Stage: Factors, Conditions, and Background Causes of the Uprising

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South Africa entered the 1970s on the complacent high of a swaggering economy, a glittering white standard of living, and a black population acquiescent and bludgeoned into submission after the Sharpeville shootings of 1960. Just beyond its borders, Namibia's liberation movement (SWAPO) seemed little more than an irritant, Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) seemed to be holding up well against its own liberation movements and sanctions (thanks to its powerful southern neighbor), and colonialist Portugal heralded victory against national liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola. Things also looked bright internationally. Under the new Tory administration of Edward Heath, England resumed its arms supplies to South Africa and planned to negotiate its way out of the Rhodesian difficulty with South Africa's interests in mind. In the United States, Henry Kissinger had made it clear to President Nixon that white rule in South Africa would not be overthrown, while the Central Intelligence Agency continued to operate in the counterliberation efforts of South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia.

Behind all of this, however, the South African economy was faltering. Continued capital accumulation was butting up not only against a domestic market confined by cheap migrant labor but also against the limits posed by the absence of the skilled labor force that industrial expansion demanded. World markets were going into deep recession driven by steeply rising oil prices, aggravating the growing economic crisis in South Africa. The inflows of foreign capital that had sustained the rapid growth of the 1960s began to dry up; the number of unemployed African workers rose inexorably1 as the shortages of skilled workers grew acute. In response to criticism and pressure from business interests who feared that the lack of skilled labor would slow economic growth, the government in 1974-75 dramatically increased the number of African students allowed into secondary schools without, however, building additional classrooms, training teachers, or providing materials that would have served or taught them adequately. Conditions in the classrooms and schools deteriorated. The 1970s also saw an intensification of social and political struggles: After the fierce and effective crackdown on opposition movements in South Africa following Sharpeville in 1960, the forces of liberation were in a state of disarray and the South African people were stunned. From 1972 onward, however, South African industry was hit by wave upon wave of strikes by African workers demanding higher wages and the right to organize. Although most of these strikes and stoppages were suppressed by force, the fledgling black trade unions began to shape a black political discourse based on class and nonracialism. It was, however, Black Consciousness that overwhelmingly shaped the black political discourse in the early 1970s, taking resistance beyond class struggle and focusing it on black pride, self-awareness, fearlessness, and liberation from white racism.2

They tell us that the situation is a class struggle rather than a racial one.

[…]

Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression—the blackness of their skin—and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.3

Under the guidance of Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness Movement reawakened and refocused the political militancy of black intelligentsia and youth. Despite its intellectual and political inspiration from the civil-rights and Black Power movements in the United States as well as from postcolonial thought elsewhere, Black Consciousness was distinctly South African. It provided a new Black identity and fearlessness that stared the severely oppressive apartheid regime proudly in the face. No longer would the African people allow themselves to be powerless, a "race of beggars who smile at the enemy and swear at him in the sanctity of their toilets; who shout 'baas'4 willingly during the day and call the white man a dog in their busses as they go home."5

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On his own, therefore, the black man wishes to explore his surrounding and test his possibilities—in other words to make his freedom real by whatever means he deems fit. At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realisation by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.6

Other jolts to white power reinforced and shaped the crisis in South Africa. In 1974, exhausted by years of anticolonial war, the Portuguese armed forces overthrew the fascist dictatorship in Lisbon. The immediate collapse of Portuguese colonialism in 1974-75 dealt a frightening blow to South Africa's regional strategy of maintaining white-ruled sympathetic "buffer states" to hold African liberation at bay. The blow was perhaps deeper even to South Africa's political consciousness. This first real shift in the balance of power in southern Africa elicited a striking response from blacks living under apartheid. In 1974, students in Durban organized an illegal rally of 30,000 people to demonstrate solidarity with Mozambique's FRELIMO liberation army. After this so-called Currie's Fountain Rally, Black Consciousness leaders in Durban and all over the country were arrested, detained without trial, and finally charged under the Terrorism Act. Among those arrested and tried were Aubrey Mokoape and Strini Moodley, close associates of Steve Biko. Biko himself was a witness during the trial. Mozambican independence in June 1975 was widely celebrated in South Africa's black communities.

Only a few months later, South Africa, believing itself supported by a sympathetic U.S. government but confusing Washington's signals, launched its first incursion into Angola. Operation Zulu, as it was known, was humiliatingly defeated on the outskirts of Luanda by Angolan and Cuban troops. No amount of propaganda could divert gleeful black South Africans from recognizing that this withdrawal was a stinging setback for the apartheid regime and helped precipitate widespread black defiance.

For students in particular, Black Consciousness and the liberation of Mozambique and of Angola may have produced a "spirit of determination and assertiveness." The large increase in the number of secondary-school students and the simultaneous reduction in employment raised their "level of frustration."7 Among Africans in general the level of discontent was raised by the drop in the rate of house construction and by the tightening of influx-control measures. In addition, Bantu Affairs Administration Boards (in Soweto, the WRAB) had taken control of the townships. Their administration was characterized by a deterioration both of quality of services and in communication and responsiveness, raising levels of frustration and increasing anger. The looming independence of homelands, with the consequent loss of South African citizenship, heightened feelings of insecurity. Conditions in the townships, the rule of the Bantu Administration and police, and the undermining culture of police informers alone would have been enough to prompt collective resistance or violence. All of these factors converged to produce crisis conditions that threatened to disrupt the social, political, and economic order that the South African apartheid state had sought to construct. By the 1970s South Africa suffered a complex and multileveled series of contradictions, pressures, conflicts, and struggles—all of which, with June 16, plunged South Africa's "golden age"8 into a dark time of violent rebellion and brutal police repression, conditions that seriously threatened the apartheid state and society as it had been. In the real world, however, crises can persist for long periods without producing change.9 The existence of crisis conditions alone explains neither why a violent uprising erupted when it did, nor whether and how those conditions generated change.10

In the immediate inquiry into the causes of the uprising, the question of timing was foremost. On the morning of June 17, 1976, Minister of Police James Kruger, asked before the House of Assembly: "The question which occurs to one is why the riots occurred at this precise juncture."11

^top Distorted Education and Prelude to Uprising

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The protests that led to the Soweto uprising began in the schools, among students, and over an issue of education—the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of instruction in black schools. Education policy and the environment in township schools were thus among the most important factors that shaped the context for the uprising. Many parents held a deep belief that education would empower their children and somehow protect them from the worst excesses of apartheid. "We never had a say, we never had to ask anything," a former Soweto student explained, "the only thing we were supposed to do was to go to school, for which intentions we never knew. But we were supposed to go to school."12

In the long and difficult history of education in South Africa, the legislation most pertinent to the shaping of education and the school system in Soweto was the Bantu Education Act of 1953. It was based largely on the recommendations of the Commission on Native Education, headed by Dr. Eiselen, which was established by the new Nationalist government in 1949. In keeping with the centralization of control over all African affairs, administration and command of education services was transferred from the provincial authorities to the newly established Division of Bantu Education (later the Department of Bantu Education). Similarly, in keeping with all the other efforts at racial separation and segregation, the Bantu Education Act was premised on the drawing of an absolute distinction between white and black education, a distinction that took into consideration the original terms of reference of the Eiselen Commission. Bantu Education was to consider "Natives as an independent race [characterized by] their past and present, their inherent racial qualities, their distinctive characteristics and aptitude, and their needs under ever-changing social conditions."13 The syllabi were thus designed to meet these terms, and the school textbooks were filled with distortions:

Bantu Education meant being taught of a tribal identity. In their history books, it meant that the white man "discovered" the "savage" African and civilised him. The derogatory word "Bantu" was used instead of African. It meant being taught that our national heroes like Tshaka and Hintsa were brutal murderers yet they were African patriots who fought against the white invasion of our country.

[…]

It meant being taught that the white man is superior to a black man. Above all it meant the unquestionable acceptance of the philosophy of apartheid.14

What the law did not do was provide for free and compulsory education or the means to keep African children at school. Parents were expected to make major contributions to the education of their children, not only through the provision of uniforms, books, and school supplies but also through school fees and a small levy added to rent payments. Enrollment at a school was dependent on the registration of children on their parents' housing permits, with obvious consequences for those whose status in Soweto was "illegal." Joyce Sikakane recalled a "raid" of school-age children in Soweto in 1973. The action was taken in response to an appeal by Peter Lengene, one of the Urban Bantu councilors, to get juveniles roaming the streets into classrooms, and Sikakane noted that it netted not only those children who were running truant but also all those who were "illegal":

The police responded quickly to this call. The youths were "collected" in pick-up police vans and locked up in cells at the police station. Those aged sixteen and above who had not yet obtained passes were prosecuted, those who had passes but were not working were all sent to the Bantustan [Homeland] transit camps as they were "undesirable idling Bantus." The under-sixteens were ordered to return to their parents and attend school. They were required to report to the police station every day on their way to and from school. They were made to sign a police register to prove that they were at school.15

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The ages of children at school were disproportionately high (See also Students/Scholars.) This was partly because African children were not admitted into primary school until they were 7 (6 for whites) and partly because African children went to school for 13 years (as compared to 12 for white children)—two preprimary grades, six "standards" in primary school, and five "forms" in high school. In addition, children did not always make it through those years in a continuous fashion, often dropping out because parents could not afford the school fees or because they had to look after younger siblings. This was especially true for girls. It was therefore not uncommon for young people to be in school into their twenties. In 1973 the average median age for black boys in the last year of high school was 19.3 (17.43 for white boys). On the one hand, therefore, the ages of schoolchildren were skewed toward an older group, and some students were in their twenties. On the other hand, children of a very young age were asked to take upon themselves the chores and the responsibilities of maturity. Many school-age children, however, did not go to school. In Soweto alone, there was a backlog of about 800 classrooms (70 schools).16 Although the number of schools increased in the four years preceding the uprising (and doubled in the case of high schools), the number of potential students still exceeded the capacity of the schools. Class rooms were still overcrowded with a pupil-teacher ratio of 47 to 1 (as compared to a national average of 19 to 1 for white schoolchildren).17 In January 1976, the press reported gross overcrowding in primary schools. Principals were loath to turn students away, and several schools reported class sizes staggeringly high, some of them having as many as 113 students.18

In the schools, mostly simple brick buildings with few amenities, there was an acute shortage of teachers, and classes were almost bare of educational materials and books. The average amount of money spent on a white student in 1975-76 was R542, compared to R41.80 for an African child and R139.62 for a Coloured child.19 To give more children a chance to attend school without building more schools, the administration introduced two sessions of three hours each (called the "hot system" by the people of Soweto—one session in the morning, the other in the afternoon), instead of one session of four and one-half hours. From 1956, primary schools were organized according to ethnic group and teachers taught in the children's mother language. Beyond primary school (standard 5 and up), instruction was in either English or Afrikaans on a "50-50" basis. Whichever language was chosen for the medium of instruction, the other would become a subject to which extra teaching time was allotted.

Statistics for 1978 indicated that 90 percent of African children between the ages of 5 and 9 attended school, 81 percent of those between 10 and 14 years, and, significantly, only 26 percent of those between 15 and 19 years. When their school day ended or when they had no school to attend, many children had nowhere to go. Out-of-school activities were limited owing to a scarcity of funds for sports and of libraries, facilities, and appropriate gathering places such as parks or youth centers. Few cultural activities (e.g., music and drama) or services relating to physical health, psychological health, or social welfare were available for Soweto schoolchildren.20

Number of Primary and Secondary Schools and Pupils attending
Year	Primary Schools	No. of Pupils	Secondary Schools	No. of Pupils
1972	196	131,582	19	12,656
1973	207	144,866	21	14,731
1974	220	142,270	32	18,281
1975	223	143,020	38	25,598
1976	249	137,157	41	34,656
Source: House of Assembly, Questions and Replies, Hansard volume 70 (21 January to 24 June 1977), 155-56.

The result of these many factors was that many young Sowetans were dropouts, without jobs and poorly educated. This presented a curious problem, reflected throughout in the language and terminology chosen by those who wrote and spoke about the events in Soweto in 1976. The way children and youth were written about, the kind of language that was used to refer to them in the context of the Soweto uprising, was determined by several distinct circumstances—first, by a different set of language cultures that informed each other but also protested each other and that involved a usage that may be unfamiliar to American ears; second, by the particular character of African childhood in the townships, in which African children, being African first and children second, often bore the brunt of the material consequences of apartheid; and third, overlaying all of this, by the rhetoric of victimization and outrage, on one side of the political spectrum, and, on the other, by the rhetoric of delinquency, juvenile irrationality, and immaturity, some of which is captured in the following:

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Poor education is a major cause of poverty, of low level employment and unemployment, and a contributory factor to other problems like apathy, lack of confidence and social maladjustment.21

Bantu education and the policies of "retribalization," or reinforcement of ethnic identity in accordance with the central government's plan to relegate Africans superfluous to the white economy to rural, "traditional" homelands, were immediately suspect as deliberately inferior and recognized as instruments of apartheid. Ethnic identities were to be reinforced through mother-tongue instruction in the primary schools, and all institutions of higher learning were relegated to the Bantustans where they became known as "bush universities." Everything worked in concert. All white universities were closed to African students, and neighborhoods were divided along ethnic lines. When there were not enough places for children in the schools, parents were told to send their children back to the homelands. Those who could afford it, or who had family ties in the rural areas, often did so. They took advantage of family there to provide child care or to shield their children from the overcrowded classrooms of the townships and the uncertainties of childhood there.22

Two things changed in the early 1970s. The law had always provided that both official languages—Afrikaans and English—be taught on a "50-50" basis in African schools. In 1974, the director of education of the Transvaal Region issued a series of circulars that were to enforce this "50-50" division of languages in the schools and that designated certain subjects to be taught in Afrikaans (mathematics and social studies) and others in English (general science). The Department of Bantu Education had routinely granted requests by schools seeking exemption from the application of the Afrikaans ruling, but now suddenly such requests were being denied. Simultaneously, the schools were restructured to bring the African curriculum into line with the 12-year system of all other schools. Standard 6, the last year of primary school, was dropped. In addition, Standard 5 now became the first year of secondary school (high school). As a result of this, the new and strict application of the "50-50 rule" was extended downward to include not only younger children but also a much larger number of students. In 1974 there were as many students enrolled in Standard 5 as in all five forms of high school together.23 All of these students, together with those who would have been in Standard 6, created a bulge of students, who under the new rules would be expected to study in Afrikaans and to take the higher primary certificate examination within a year of this switch. Teachers, parents, community leaders, school principals, and the school boards and organizations that represented them worried about the lack of proficient teachers and about the problems they were expected to have teaching an already difficult subject such as mathematics. In vain they appealed to the Department of Bantu Education to abandon the new policy. Incensed, students fought back.24

For those who had eyes to see or ears to hear, the signs were unmistakable. Students had begun to protest the new language ruling in May 1976. By the end of the month, strikes had spread to eight schools. In June, 15 schoolboys were taken to Orlando police station and questioned.

We were very much concerned because certainly you could sense that there was something wrong with the young people. I had worked with young people and if you found a cluster of them somewhere in a corner … it was just a normal thing for them to pass and say hi and they would say hi. But I gained the sense that this was … you passed a group of children and they just looked sour and they looked locked up and some of us came together and we said but do you realize what is happening and it was after some of the kids had been detained and there were no trials, so we thought maybe we should do something about it.25

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Ellen Kuzwayo and six other women from Soweto took it upon themselves to find out what troubled the township community, but all they learned was that people were frightened and unsure of what was happening. They composed a letter to Jimmy Kruger, the minister of police, and after several tries they were invited to Pretoria to meet with him. There they were ignored in a travesty of official disregard:

[A]fter two or three letters a reply came that we could come and we prepared a paper that we wanted to present to him, a memorandum, and the seven of us went over to Pretoria to the Union Buildings and we got there. We went to Mr. Kruger's office hoping that we were going to talk to him and say is there something that can done, to say what we are sort of frightened about, we don't know what is happening, can he bring these children to trial and probably the atmosphere might change. We got there, Mr. Kruger was unfortunately not in his office but we went to the senior man that was there and we said we have come to see Mr. Kruger by appointment and he is not there. We said we had this letter for Mr. Kruger, we would be very pleased if he would pass it to him and he can contact us at this particular place and the gentleman said he will want to open this letter in your presence. We said we are very happy, you can open it, you can look at it and he said who are you, we said we are we. And he said well do something to prove who you are. So we queued up and left our signatures in the office and after that we felt we should go to the Prime Minister's Office to say to the Prime Minister we have left a letter in Mr. Kruger's office, we hope that you are also going to allow, to look into it because we are concerned. We got to Mr. Vorster's office, there was nobody.26

Several other attempts were made to warn the authorities, even the prime minister, of the imminent crisis, of brewing disaffection. On May 25, Fred van Zyl, director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, sent a telegram to Rene de Villiers, a member of Parliament (Progressive Party): "Deeply concerned Afrikaans medium controversy Black schools. Position Soweto very serious. Could you discuss matter with Minister concerned?"27 Andries Treurnicht, deputy minister of Bantu Administration at the time, answered that he was not aware of any problem but would investigate to determine if there was one. In response to another, more urgent message received on June 11, Treurnicht said he did not believe the situation had escalated.28 Speaking a few months later before the Cillié Commission, Stefanus Meyer, the first witness for the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), testified in camera that indeed the authorities had been aware of the brewing discontent and the potential for conflict:

In the time period before the development of the uprising the Bureau had already reported to higher authority that there was at that stage a tendency clearly noticable in Soweto that possibly could point towards a race relations clash, and that it had taken on disturbing proportions. It was especially so as we found at that stage, noticable among the youth and to a lesser degree in the work place.29

Leonard Mosala, a member of the Urban Bantu Council, warned of another Sharpeville. "We have failed to help [the children] in their struggle for change in schools," he said. "They are now angry and prepared to fight and we are afraid the situation may become chaotic…"30 Even the Afrikaans-language newspaper Die Beeld, ran front-page stories about the dangers of ignoring school boycotts in Soweto, and the headlines explicitly acknowledged the issue of Afrikaans as the reason for the school boycotts:31"Afrikaans 'beveg' in Soweto," (Afrikaans "fought" in Soweto) Die Beeld reported just a few days before June 16.32 On May 8, 1976, barely a month before the uprising, Bishop Desmond Tutu wrote a letter, heavy with premonition, to the prime minister, John Vorster:

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I am writing to you, Sir, because I have a growing nightmarish fear that unless something drastic is done very soon then bloodshed and violence are going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably. A people can take only so much and no more. […] A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means. I am frightened, dreadfully frightened, that we may soon reach a point of no return, when events will generate a momentum of their own, when nothing will stop their reaching a bloody denouement which is "too ghastly to contemplate" to quote your own words, Sir.33

They were to be prophetic words, and only a few weeks later a second sign would appear next to the one on the old Potchefstroom Road that led into Soweto. It was more ominous than the first, although it needed fewer words to convey its meaning. Peter Magubane took a photograph, in which the second "sign" can be seen looming larger than the one that announced the entrance to Soweto and the guardianship of the West Rand Administration in no uncertain terms: Atop a rough-hewn, four-posted scaffold was balanced the empty, burnt-out, and battered shell of a delivery truck, its firm's logo all but invisible on the side, tires and doors torn away or gaping and bent and buckled.34 With its black shadows and threatening bulk, it dwarfed those walking beneath it—mute testimony to and symbol of the war Soweto's children had declared on the boundaries that were no longer acceptable to them.

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Notes:

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Asingeni (We Will Not Enter) The Schools