Irony in the soul

The road to freedom followed by South Africa over the past 50 years has hit a couple of cul-de-sacs

2 min read
Percy Qoboza, The World editor, reading the headlines on April 1978.In the backround is the famous picture taken by Sam Nzima of one of the first victims of the June 16, 1976 riots Hector Pieterson.
Percy Qoboza, The World editor, reading the headlines on April 1978.In the backround is the famous picture taken by Sam Nzima of one of the first victims of the June 16, 1976 riots Hector Pieterson. Percy Qoboza, The World editor, reading the headlines on April 1978.In the backround is the famous picture taken by Sam Nzima of one of the first victims of the June 16, 1976 riots Hector Pieterson.Picture: Arena Holdings/Archive

Hastings Ndlovu was the first child to die. He was 15 years old. It was 10am on June 16 1976.

Hector Pieterson, 12, was also shot and wounded, perhaps in the opening volley. He was picked up by Mbuyisa Makhubu and carried bleeding through the streets, his distraught sister Antoinette running alongside them.

June 16, at The Hector Pieterson Memmorial in Soweto. Attended by Premier of JHB, Nomvula Mokonyae and Mayor Amos Masondo.
To honour the youth of 1976 June 16, at The Hector Pieterson Memmorial in Soweto. Attended by Premier of JHB, Nomvula Mokonyae and Mayor Amos Masondo.Picture: ALON SKUY

The moment was caught by The World photojournalist Sam Nzima and became the defining image of the Soweto uprising. Nzima and colleague Sophie Tema put the dying Pieterson in the back of their car and drove him to Baragwanath Hospital.

The police were using live ammunition, teargas, batons and dogs. An Alouette helicopter circled overhead, the shrill pitch of its jet engine now locked into the distant memories of long-ago school kids and border war veterans alike.

At the end of the day 176 school pupils were dead. That figure would climb as the protests, ignited by the flagrantly unfair Afrikaans-medium decree of 1974, spread across the country.

The two inflection points of ’76 were an education crisis and heavy-handed policing. What bitter irony, then, that half a century later both are in utter disarray.

The police are no longer a threat to violent criminals, let alone schoolchildren, given the bitter stories being told at the Madlanga commission

The police are no longer a threat to violent criminals, let alone schoolchildren, given the bitter stories being told at the Madlanga commission.

Having a matric is no longer the path to a better life, given the way the bar has been repeatedly lowered.

“There shall be houses, security and comfort,” said the Freedom Charter. Hardly a lofty ideal for a country with space and riches and a miraculously deep well of patience and forgiveness from those who still have nothing.

It’s not that the promises in the charter were too difficult to achieve but perhaps that they were too easy. Here stands the Lucky Country, then, on the edge of the well-kept park, looking at the shiny playground equipment that it’s not allowed to use.