Soweto uprising 1976: The powder keg ignites

Soweto uprising 1976

The powder keg ignites

THIRTY YEARS ago, South Africa’s vicious apartheid regime was shaken
by an heroic uprising started by thousands of school students in the
black ‘township’ of Soweto near Johannesburg. The police killed at least
140 people on 16-17 June 1976, mostly in Soweto and 600 as they tried to
put down the revolt.

South Africa was then still under the apartheid regime which used
‘separate development’ to disenfranchise, racially segregate and keep
down the country’s black majority and to ensure plentiful cheap labour.

The ruling Nationalist government insisted that school lessons in
certain subjects must be taken in Afrikaans – a simplified form of Dutch
closely associated with white minority rule and particularly with the
oppression of apartheid. This was part of their policy of ‘Bantu
Education’, a contemptuous attempt to create an enslaved cheap labour
black working class.

Students had begun boycotting Afrikaans classes and elected an action
committee that later became the Soweto Students’ Representative Council
(SSRC). The campaign started with a demonstration on 16 June. As
Militant, the predecessor of the socialist, reported (25/6/76):
"The spark that precipitated the outbreak was the cold-blooded
firing by the police into the ranks of demonstrating school
children."

The police fired tear gas into the crowd, then estimated at 12,000
strong. The students replied with a volley of stones, so the police
fired directly into the crowd, killing many young protesters.
13-year-old Hector Petersen was one of the first victims of the police
onslaught, being shot down in front of his sister and friends.

The unarmed school students, who had been singing and waving
placards, refused to be terrorised! Militant quoted a black photographer
who said: "More children fell. There seemed to be no plan. The
police were merely bursting away at the mob." But many of the youth
themselves "seemed oblivious to the danger. They continued running
towards the police – dodging and ducking."

Conditions under apartheid and under capitalism were so oppressive
that young blacks were prepared to face bullet-firing police armed only
with stones. The police retreated as the youth attacked all buildings
associated with the hated apartheid state, emptying liquor from the
bottle stores and requisitioning petrol – in the name of the revolution
– for petrol bombs.

The education system was the spark but there were many such
grievances throughout apartheid South Africa, especially in the
townships. Militant described Soweto as a "powder keg waiting for a
match to set it alight" with "virtual concentration
camps".

"The inmates are let out in the early mornings to work in
factories, services and as servants for white employers. They get up at
5.30am to leave by 6am… They return at 7pm or 8pm. 80% have no
electric lights, running water or water-borne lavatories.

"There is no street lighting, unpaved roads become mud tracks.
Row upon row of virtual boxes, without internal doors and with
corrugated iron roofs, virtually no amenities, except beer halls to
drown out their miseries…

"A million Africans are packed into Soweto. Half the population
is unemployed and therefore without permits to stay, at the mercy of any
police raid."

The article contrasted the dreadful conditions of the townships with
the privileged life of many middle-class whites "with lawns,
swimming pools and all modern amenities. They have (black) servants,
maids and cooks, even gardeners."

Apartheid governments had set up so-called "independent’
Bantustans on South Africa’s periphery. 20 million black Africans were
to share 13% of mainly barren land while four million whites controlled
87% of fertile land. That meant that blacks who had been born in white
areas would be regarded as ‘migrant’ labour.’ Most black workers had
never seen these mythical homelands, but were robbed of South African
citizenship.

Workers’ struggles

HOWEVER THE Soweto uprising changed the consciousness of South
Africa’s black working class. Between 1961 and 1974 the number of black
workers in South Africa’s manufacturing industry doubled. As Militant
said two months after the uprising: "The key to developments in
South Africa, if not the whole continent, is the increasingly organised
black working class.

"The industrialisation programme of the capitalists themselves
has created the black industrial workers, with their numerical strength,
their concentration in the enormous rundown townships that surround the
big cities, and therefore all the preconditions for the adoption of
socialist ideas."

In 1973, at least 100,000 black workers had gone on strike, mainly in
the Durban area, demanding higher wages. The state had to concede the
right to strike to black workers. Meanwhile international developments,
such as the revolution in Portugal that ignited the fire of revolt in
the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, increased the
attraction of Black Consciousness, based on the ideas of the Black
Panthers and the US civil rights movement.

But as a 1986 article on Soweto by South African socialist and
anti-apartheid activist, Weizmann Hamilton, reprinted in this month’s
Socialism Today says: "In revolutionary periods, the working class
learns in days and hours what it takes years to learn in periods of
class tranquillity."

Many workers, parents of the dead and injured students from Soweto
and the worse repression that followed – when just raising a clenched
fist and shouting "Amandla (freedom)" was enough to warrant a
police bullet in the head – spontaneously stayed away from work the next
day

Youth in Alexandria township, north of Johannesburg, had seen that
they couldn’t beat the apartheid state forces by themselves and appealed
to their parents at work to back them. By 22 June, over 1,000 workers at
the Chrysler car factory had stopped work in the first strike action
consciously held in support of the students.

In Soweto, the SSRC took on the responsibility of organising for a
student march into Johannesburg on 4 August and for three days the first
political general strike since 1961.

The government conceded on the Afrikaans issue but the revolt had
gone too far and was now clearly aimed at the regime itself. With the
increasingly militant and well-organised youth going house to house
explaining the situation to their parents, a series of ‘stay-aways’ was
organised as well as demonstrations, sit-ins, bus boycotts etc.

Free market

THE FLAMES of revolt fanned by the Soweto massacre stayed alive for
more than a year but the ideas of Black Consciousness could not take the
struggle forward after the end of the 1970s.

The African National Congress (ANC) with its Freedom Charter – widely
seen and appreciated as a far-reaching agenda for social change – gained
the backing of the youth as well as the working class.

The youth became more and more anti-capitalist in the 1980s. A period
of mass struggle between 1984 and 1986 was a major factor in forcing the
ruling class to agree a settlement ending white minority rule and
allowing black South Africans access to free elections.

The ANC, who had already ditched the Freedom Charter and its demand
for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, won
elections in 1994 and have been in power since.

They are now carrying out the unashamed neoliberal ‘free market’
policies of the so-called Growth, Employment and Redistribution
programme. As the introduction to the Socialism Today article says:
"12 years after the fall of white minority rule, a new class
apartheid characterises South Africa."

Today the country has 40% unemployment, 50% living in poverty, and
one of the most unequal wealth and income distributions in the world.
Young people are again bearing the brunt of policies that entrenched the
economic dictatorship of the white capitalist class and a minuscule
black elite.

Less than half of those who leave school reach the final year while
sky-high tuition fees restrict opportunities for those in tertiary
education. More social explosions are on the cards in South Africa.

The working class and youth need socialism now as much as ever. The
Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM, part of the Committee for a Workers’
International, to which the Socialist Party is affiliated) is today
campaigning for a mass workers’ party fighting on a socialist programme.

Compiled with additional material by Roger Shrives