It’s June 16, 1976 and it’s a normal working day at the offices of DRUM magazine in Eloff Street in Booysens, Johannesburg.
I’m working on my usual column, a review of the latest music records, supplied by the record companies. Stan Motjuwadi, a great journalist and one of my mentors, casually says he’s going to check on the march by students in Soweto, and goes out with photographer Mike Mzileni.
A normal working day … until a breathless Motjuwadi phone: “Soweto is burning, and children are dying!”
I dash to the editor, Philip Selwyn-Smith, and tell him I can’t be sitting in the office and writing a music column when my children are dying. I get into my old Volkswagen Beetle and drive to Soweto.
As I enter Soweto on the Diepkloof side, I encounter my first roadblock, “manned” – for crying out loud, it wasn’t men, but children who stopped me and asked where I was going.
When I told them I was a reporter and worked for DRUM, they lifted their barricades to let me through. One of them handed me a bottle of beer from the crates they had lifted from the bottle stores they had broken into.
I’d stopped drinking booze four years before, but that bottle became my passport through Soweto. Every time I came to a roadblock, I’d wave the bottle and would be let through.
Orlando West, Dube, Mofolo, Nhlanzane, Naledi, Moroka, Pimville … burnt out shells of trucks and expensive cars.
The kids had taken matters into their own hands. Down with Afrikaans! Down with Bantu Education! Down with the Boers! Down with apartheid!
Police and soldiers in cars, vans and armoured vehicles crisscrossed the township shooting teargas and even live bullets when they saw any group of kids. Kids. It became a deadly game.
You’ve probably been hearing stories like this since the beginning of June, as we remember the courageous youth of 1976. Youth led by Tsietsi Mashinini, Khotso Seatlholo, Murphy Morobe and others.
However, allow me to interrupt that narrative and remind you of a story that last month attempted to break into our consciousness. One of the headlines shouted:
• South Africa has produced one of the worst readings with meaning results in the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study results.
• The assessment done with grade 4 pupils reveals 81% cannot read for meaning.
Apartheid is dead! Long live apartheid! The children who can’t read are not from the affluent northern suburbs and their model C and private schools, they are from the no-fees schools.
They are the poor, the downtrodden in our nation; they continue to be crippled and condemned in Verwoerdian tones to their future roles as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
I expected a crescendo of anger and action from all who suffered because of apartheid: many of them are now in senior positions in government and in the department of education.
Confronting similar assessment results, in his 2019 State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa proposed that 10-year-old children should be able to read for meaning by 2030.
Mr President, South Africa doesn’t have the luxury of time. We’ve already squandered 29 years since the “death of apartheid” and 47 years since the children of Soweto and of South Africa spoke.
When some of us vehemently opposed the negotiations with the National Party at the close of the 80s, the ANC pleaded with us to let them get to the “levers of power” and these levers would be used to destroy it.
Is this how you had planned to use the levers?
• Thloloe is a veteran journalist, former managing editor of Sowetan, former trade unionist and recipient of Order of Ikhamanga Silver.
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