Soweto 1976: An Audio History (NPR Radio Diaries, 2006)
Author: Joe Richmond and Ben Shapiro
The voices you hear remembering the events of 1976 are:
- Mr. Sonny Venkatrathnam (1 quote)
- Mr. Ahmed Kathrada (1 quote)
- Mr. Murphy Morobi (6 quotes)
- Mr. Nthato Motlana (9 quotes)
- Ms. Bongi Mkhabela (11 quotes)
- Ms. Thandi Modise (5 quotes)
- Mr. Strini Moodley (2 quotes)
The voices you hear on newsreel soundbites (recordings) are:
- Unidentified Announcer #1
- President FOUCHE (South Africa)
- Mr. STEVE BIKO (Anti-Apartheid activist)
- Unidentified Announcer #2
- Unidentified Announcer #3
- Unidentified Announcer #4
- Unidentified Announcer #5
- Unidentified Announcer #6
- children singing
- shots fired
- Unidentified Announcer #7
- Unidentified Announcer #8
- Unidentified Announcer #9
- Unidentified Announcer #10
- Unidentified Announcer #11
- demonstrators singing
MICHELE NORRIS, Host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising in South Africa. For decades, the whites only government had brutally enforced a policy of racial segregation known as Apartheid and just as ruthlessly crushed any opposition. By the 1970s an entire generation of anti-apartheid fighters had been silenced.
But on June 16th, 1976, a group of school children in the black township of Soweto decided to hold a protest. At the time, nobody thought their action would change the course of a nation. Producers Joe Richman and Ben Shapiro bring us the voices and sounds of what happened in Soweto in 1976.
(Soundbite of newsreel)
Unidentified Announcer #1: Cape Town glowed in warm, sunny weather today for one of its most colorful ceremonies, the opening of Parliament. It was opened at noon by the president, Mr. Fouche.
President FOUCHE (South Africa): The republic has enjoyed a year of peace and tranquility –
Mr. SONNY VENKATRATHNAM (South African resident): All political movements were banned. Everything was quiet, ostensible. In terms of the struggle, we were in the doldrums.
Mr. AHMED KATHRADA (South African resident): They had virtually crushed the movement in South Africa. It was a bad period for us.
Mr. MURPHY MOROBI (South African resident): A number of people were being killed in detention. People were very scared to get involved.
Mr. NTHATO MOTLANA (South African resident): And yet, under the surface, it continued to bubble.
Ms. BONGI MKHABELA (South African resident): They had locked up Mandela in jail. But they hadn’t looked around to see where are their children and what are they doing?
Mr. MOTLANA: The student movement, under the leadership of people like Steve Biko, there arose a group imbued with the spirit of black consciousness.
Mr. STEVE BIKO (Anti-Apartheid activist): Black people need to defeat the one element in politics which is working against them. And this was a psychological feeling of inferiority.
Ms. THANDI MODISE (South African resident): There was an emergence amongst black townships of self-definition. Do you take what your father has taken or do you stand up for what you think is right?
Mr. STRINI MOODLEY (South African resident): The reaction of the older generation to us was, are you guys mad? Those guys are gonna come blow you away. They’re gonna kill you. And we said, no. First thing is you stand up and speak your mind as any normal human being has the right to do.
Mr. MOTLANA: There was a state of unease throughout the country. You could feel it. You could feel that something had to give. And it happened on June 16.
(Soundbite of radio broadcast)
Unidentified Announcer #2: Teach yourself Afrikaans. Good evening, listeners. Let us start off by getting to know all the Afrikaans sounds – lach, dach and nach.
Mr. MOTLANA: Afrikaans is a hybridization, if you like, of Dutch.
Unidentified Announcer #2: Lach, dach and nach. Thank you, easy isn’t it?
Mr. MOTLANA: It’s a language that was used by the rulers. And the black children hated Afrikaans with a passion.
(Soundbite of newsreel)
Unidentified Announcer #3: 1975 and Afrikaans is exactly 100 years old. To pay homage to the Afrikaans language, pupils of the school present a play in Afrikaans.
Ms. MKHABELA: Every school day began with an assembly of all the kids. One day there’s an announcement.
(Soundbite of government announcement)
Unidentified Announcer #4: I am going to speak to you about Bantu education, the education of a million Bantu children.
Ms. MKHABELA: As of today, every subject would be taught in Afrikaans. And the teacher walks in, history becomes haskeedinis. And we were all like, what are you talking about?
Ms. MODISE: And our teacher was standing there trying very hard. He has an Afrikaans dictionary on the one hand and he was trying to translate. And in complete exasperation, the teacher just said, you know what, I don’t know.
Ms. MKHABELA: And that didn’t work, whole classes failed. When they did that, they actually mobilized the entire school generation, because it represented everything that the oppressors stood for. This was a battle we had to fight.
(Soundbite of educational film)
Unidentified Announcer #5: Soweto, a complex of black townships on the southwest corner of Johannesburg with an estimated population of one-and-one-quarter million. Every day, Sowetans pour into white homes, offices and factories in Johannesburg, leaving the township to the children and the teenagers.
Ms. MKHABELA: June 16, 1976, starts very much as an ordinary day.
Mr. MOROBI: Our school started at 8 a.m., as the tradition has had it, with the singing of the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come. But on this day, instead of the Lord’s Prayer, we sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God Bless Africa, which was our signal tune to march out of the school premises. And we all joined at the time.
(Singing)
(Soundbite of newsreel)
Unidentified Announcer #6: At 8:15 in the morning, and precisely according to plan, students simultaneously marched out of five schools in Soweto, intending to protest the Afrikaans issue in a mass meeting at the Orlando Football Stadium.
Ms. MKHABELA: We had hundreds, probably thousands of school kids. And we thought we knew everything there is to know about managing protests. The first thing we worried about was that everyone must be accounted for at all times. So we then had chains of five kids and make sure you are holding somebody’s hand all the time. And if you are not holding somebody’s hand, get worried, because where is your partner?
(Soundbite of children singing)
Mr. MOTLANA: Then it became really a torrent, a sea of young, black faces. Masses of students, I mean, we’d never seen such a demonstration in many, many years. And at that point, the police tried to stop the march from going on to Orlando Stadium.
Ms. MKHABELA: I’ve never seen that many police. And you didn’t only have police at that time, you had the Defense Force. So you actually had the Army.
Mr. MOTLANA: They intervened by, first of all, setting dogs. And I saw these police dogs set onto these kids, man, and I saw moments of real courage, especially from the girls.
Ms. MKHABELA: I mean, this is a group of kids, kids with shining black shoes and little white socks and teeny little tunics. And they are singing freedom songs, holding one another. We actually looked cute. It’s unbelievable to think that anyone could have stood firm on their feet and actually shot into that crowd.
(Soundbite of shots fired)
Mr. MOROBI: Your initial thought is to secure yourself. And then you look around you, you see girls running, screaming.
Ms. MKHABELA: We had hundreds of school kids running helter-skelter, running all over the place. We had planned for water pipes, we had planned for maybe rubber bullets. We had not planned or thought that it’s possible that people were actually going to be killed on that day.
(Soundbite of newreel)
Unidentified Announcer #7: The teeming black township of Soweto has finally erupted into the violence that whites have been fearing for years. At least two of the dead fell when police opened fire on a crowd.
Ms. MKHABELA: I don’t know why they decided to shoot. I can only think it was black life and it didn’t count. Life of African people had always been cheap.
Mr. MOROBI: I mean, having grown up in the township, you know, you heard gunshots. But the sounds of bullets flying, you know, you standing on top of an abandoned car and suddenly you hear bullets thudding on the side, you know. Not knowing where the next one is going to come from. You just get a sense of how fleeting life can be and you feel, you know, how are you going to deal with it tomorrow?
(Soundbite of newsreel)
Unidentified Announcer #8: Within 36 hours of the start of a march by 10,000 pupils in protest against Afrikaans, 29 people were dead and 250 injured.
Mr. MOTLANA: The mayhem went all over Soweto. The following day, it went on all over the country. And really, South Africa was on fire.
(Soundbite of newsreel)
Unidentified Announcer #9: Here in Durban, three police baton charges were needed to break up a 2,000-strong demonstration at Claremont’s native township.
Mr. MAKATINI: It was like a country at war. And I never forget listening to my radio as the demonstrations were spreading like crazy fire. That taught me that the regime that we thought was powerful seemed to be terribly disorganized, panicking.
(Soundbite of government announcement)
Unidentified Announcer #10: In these circumstances, the government has decided on the following measures. No disorder will be tolerated. Agitators who do not cease their activities immediately will be placed in detention in terms of the Internal Securities Acts. Strong police units will be on hand to deal with any persons who –
Mr. MOROBI: For days, Soweto became the smell of tear gas. And the kids got to know how to counteract tear gas. Take a piece of cloth, wet it and hold it to your nose.
(Soundbite of newscast)
Unidentified Announcer #11: Since June 16, when South African troops and police opened fire on a peaceful schoolchildren’s demonstration, the white government has presided over the largest massacre of its black population since South Africa came into existence –
Ms. MODISE: When you see your friends being shot at for just walking in the street, it does something to you. And therefore, you would look around. What are the alternatives? Do I become like my mother, forever be under the yoke of apartheid? And the alternative was for me to not be like my mom, great as she was, but to go and fight.
(Singing)
Mr. MOTLANA: And ‘76 really represented, in many ways, divorce between black children and their parents.
Ms. MKHABELA: It was clear in all of us kids, at that time, that peaceful struggle, negotiated settlements were totally out of the question. Many of the young people who were on that march left South Africa for armed forces and for an armed struggle.
Ms. MODISE: We the youth have gone into foreign lands to learn how to fight. Mommy, please keep quiet. Even if I die, you will know that I have died fighting for our country.
Mr. MOODLEY: 1976 was the turning point. Black people had made up their mind. We’re not taking this anymore. And South Africa was never the same again.
Mr. MOROBI: Many years later after I went to jail, you know, for the events of the 16th of June, there was always at the back of my mind, you know, the images of Soweto. You know, the sense of fear there lay in everyone’s eyes, and you can even still smell the tear gas when you just think about it. It’s something that you would never want to wish on any society. In South Africa, we carry with us the scars of June 16, 1976.
(Soundbite of demonstrators singing)
NORRIS: The voices you heard remembering the events of 1976 were Bongi Mkhabela, Murphy Morobi, Nthato Motlana, Thandi Modise, Strini Moodley, Sonny Venkatrathnam and Ahmed Kathrada. Our story was produced by Joe Richmond and Ben Shapiro for RADIO DIARIES. The editor was Debra George.
There’s more about the history of apartheid at NPR.org.
Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
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