Soweto, 30 years after the uprising

I arrived in London on June 16 1976, on the second leg of a six-city European tour. I had just turned 18 a few days before, while in Rome, and I was feeling very pleased with myself, convinced that, on my visit to the papal city, the Pope had picked me out of the crowd to wave at. I was travelling with a group of high school students from South Africa.

The television set in the small hotel room in London was a novelty, the technology having only reached South Africa that year, and I moved to turn it on. That moment would have a profound and long-lasting impact on the direction my life would take. When the set crackled into life and the picture stabilised (the old valve sets needed a bit of time to warm up) the images that came into view at first confused and then shocked me.

I tried to make sense of the words of the reporter. Trouble had flared up in South Africa, in a township called Soweto. Schoolchildren had taken to the streets to protest peacefully against proposals that Afrikaans (a language of Dutch origin, used mainly by the Afrikaner group) was to be used as the medium of their instruction. In a brutal response, the police opened fire with live ammunition, killing and wounding scores of people. Hector Peterson was the first school child to die, and the newspaper picture of him being carried in the arms of an older boy, upon whose face the anguish and pain were so clearly expressed, is one that has lived on in my memory and the memory of many others.

This was the first protest in South Africa of any significant scale since the Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s, led by national leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Thambo. The imprisonment of Mandela and other leaders and the banning of organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress in effect silenced mass opposition to the ever increasing inhumanity of the apartheid system. Now, here were school children in an African township, picking up the proud mantle of resistance and showing their collective anger at a brutally unequal system.

Of the four "racial" groups in South Africa, African, coloured (mixed heritage), Indian and white, Africans were by far the worst off. In education, expenditure was 10 times higher for a white, than for an African, child. The disparities in physical facilities and material support in the form of text books and learning material were grossly disproportionate. In addition, the poor availability of reliable transport and good housing and inadequate access to basic social services rendered the educational experience of black children incomparable to that of their white counterparts.

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