In June 1976, thousands of Black schoolchildren in Soweto—a portmanteau of South Western Townships, vast urban residential areas south-west of Johannesburg, apartheid South Africa’s largest city—walked out and rallied against the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction. Nearly 200 students were killed that day as police viciously attacked the protesters, who did not want to be taught in the language of their oppressors. The rebellion spread and lasted months, transforming the political situation, inspiring the international solidarity movement, and becoming one of the defining moments in the ultimately successful anti-apartheid struggle.
A HEART-RENDING PHOTO of 13-year-old Hector Pietersen—the first student killed by the live fire unleashed by police on students peacefully protesting in the South African township of Soweto—sent shock waves around the world on 16 June 1976. The photo became the symbol of a rebellion which intensified the struggle against apartheid and brought students to the fore of that struggle.
Soweto sits near the mining belt south of Johannesburg. The students who lived there had witnessed poverty and repression all their lives—54 percent of Soweto’s 1.25 million inhabitants were unemployed in 1976, 86 percent of homes had no electricity, and 97 percent had no hot water. Even when I visited in 1992, in some areas, dozens of homes still relied on a single tap for their water supply.
The education system was changing rapidly and, just as in other countries where student rebellions erupted, schools were overcrowded and education was inadequate. All that was overlaid with the racism of Apartheid: in 1974, the state spent $440 on every white student, $25 on every Black student.
Starting in 1972, campuses had been shaken up by protests initiated by the fledgling Black Consciousness movement, resulting in expulsions, jailings and students being banned.
Before that, and playing an important part in shaping consciousness, there had been the Sharpeville massacre. The massacre took place on 21 March 1960 at a peaceful protest of about 7000 people against the hated pass laws, which controlled people’s movements. It was organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). At 1:30pm, police opened fire without warning while the crowd was waiting outside a police station to be addressed by a government official. At least 69 people were killed and a further 180 seriously injured. As a woman told a BBC documentary team, the shock of the massacre and its aftermath caused a “blanket of fear” to fall over the people.
Protests erupted in response and ferocious violence was unleashed by the state. On 30 March, a State of Emergency was declared, after which 18,000 people were detained, and the African National Congress (ANC) and PAC were banned. The South African Communist Party (SACP) and its trade union leaders had already been declared illegal in 1950. Totalitarian legislation gave almost unlimited powers to the police. Thousands were jailed, many for life on Robben Island, while others, including many trade union activists, were executed.
Sharpeville marked the end of an upward trajectory of struggle. For ten years, repressive labour laws meant strikes were virtually unheard of. Many activists fled into exile in surrounding countries.
Apartheid wasn’t just a white supremacist state. The draconian security apparatus, justified with anti-communist rhetoric, created conditions of stability which underpinned a sustained economic boom from 1963 to 1972. White South Africans had one of the highest standards of living in the world, and international capitalists drank like pigs from the vast wealth extracted from the misery of the Black masses. But as Karl Marx argued, capitalism creates its own grave diggers. New industries meant an inexorable movement of Black workers, both men and women, into and around the cities, despite the pass laws.
The next turning point was a strike wave in Durban in 1973. The strikes began in January at a Brick and Tile factory outside Durban, and quickly spread to packaging, transport and ship repairs, textile, metal and chemical plants. Dock workers were critical, holding up trade. By the end of March, approximately half of all the Black workers employed in Durban were out on strike. Companies, as always, resorted to repression, sacking militants after they returned to work, threatening others. A government minister told the media, “I want to bleed the trade unions to death”.
But the blanket of fear had been thrown off. Savage repression, unlike after Sharpeville in 1960, increasingly provoked an anger that could not be quelled. Between January and June 1974, 300 strikes involved 80,000 workers. Strikes in many mines ended in riots as police tried to bludgeon workers back underground. In just one mine, 132 were killed and 500 wounded.
In 1974, Mozambique’s victory over Portugal, the colonising power, and later the defeat of South African troops in Angola, considerably raised the confidence of Black workers. The strikes of 1973-74 had inspired the restless students, and the killings in the miners’ strikes enraged them.
Then the white government ordered that from now on, classes would be conducted in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors. This unleashed a storm of pent-up anger and bitterness at the same time as Black pride and confidence were rising.
It was an explosive mix. The slogan of the Soweto students became: “Dialogue no! Confrontation, yes! Yes! Yes!” When workers returned from work on the first day of the massacre, they were confronted by a police reign of terror, shooting people at random. Bodies were piled on trucks and taken away with no record of names or numbers, which only fuelled the anger.
And so very soon, adults joined with the students in destroying every symbol of white power. A plume of smoke hung over the township, illuminated by huge flames. Students were targeted by police so that they had to stop wearing uniforms to stay alive.
The rebellion spread like wildfire. In the days and weeks that followed, students everywhere organised in their townships and took to the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, bringing many more into the struggle. The uprising inspired township rebellions from one end of the country to the other.
In August and September, the students organised massive strikes. This was a new high point and an inspiration to socialist activists around the world. The International Socialists (precursors to Socialist Alternative), for example, toured Barney Mokgatle around Australia in August 1977. Mokgatle was an exiled secretary of the Soweto Students Representative Council and a leader of the Soweto uprising.
As Mick Armstrong recorded in the Battler, the organisation’s newspaper at the time, Mokgatle described how in Soweto, “We organised the demonstration ... The police organised the rioting ... We didn’t think that afternoon that some of our friends would be dead”. No one really knows the number of students killed that year, but according to Mokgatle, “it was much greater than the official toll of 618 ... there were mass graves outside the townships”.
Even in exile, the thousands who fled were pursued by South African security forces. Just three months before his visit, Mokgatle’s friend had been beaten up by them in London. Inside South Africa, he reported that the crackdown was intense: “Forty Black schools have been closed. The Black-produced Soweto paper The World is being closed down”. But, he argued, students were determined to keep fighting—Mokgatle predicted the struggle would intensify in spite of ongoing jailings and killings.
And students did continue to play a militant role in the townships. By the mid-1980s, the Black working class, backed up by township revolts and youth rebellions, brought South Africa to the brink of revolution. The overthrow of not just racist laws, but capitalism itself, was a real possibility.
Whether such a movement achieves victory depends on political leadership. Unfortunately, there were serious weaknesses in the politics of the Black consciousness movement, which led the initial student uprising.
And in the workers’ movement, activists who generally identified as socialists but with syndicalist tendencies had and continued to play a crucial role in Durban and the East Cape. The Workerists, as they were known, were influential in unions of metals and manufacturing, clothing, textiles and retail. They correctly argued that Black capitalism would continue the exploitation and oppression of Black workers, so capitalism needed to be overthrown and replaced with socialism. But they underplayed the question of political organisation, relying on strong, militant, democratically structured trade unions, which they did marvellous work organising, but which were insufficient on their own to achieve their goal. Related to this, they never cohered the most class-conscious militants around a clear program to defeat the ANC and SACP, which had no intention of overthrowing capitalism. This left the more conservative forces’ influence largely unchallenged.
As Mokgatle predicted, students continued to play an important role in the townships. In November 1984, they called for three stay-aways, and would continue to organise workers. But a critical mass of them backed the ANC’s moderate politics.
Debates raged in the movement between the workerists and the populists, as supporters of the ANC and SACP were known. Then, in July 1987, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), in which socialists had played a big role, signed the anti-socialist Freedom Charter of the ANC. This was a devastating blow to those who wanted to carry the revolutionary struggle through to the overthrow of capitalism. It enabled the ANC to consolidate its authority as the sole representative organisation of the Black masses, and fostered disarray among its opponents.
There were unions like the retail workers, where support for the Charter was strongly resisted. But the tide had turned, and Nelson Mandela and the SACP successfully negotiated an end to apartheid, but limited it to a transition to Black capitalism. So, tragically, one of, if not the most inspiring working-class movement of the twentieth century left the Black masses disoriented, exploited and oppressed by a new Black capitalist class.
It matters that we draw lessons from the struggles of the workers and students in South Africa. Otherwise, the narrative goes unchallenged that no amount of bravery, courage and suffering, all of which were features of the movement, can end capitalism.
In the student movement, the PAC posed as a more militant alternative to the ANC, and its activists initiated the June 1976 rebellion. But their politics were just a Black version of the ANC and SACP’s moderate position. The PAC demonstrated the dead end of what we now call identity politics—just excluding whites did not change the fact that their vision was not liberation, but one of Black capitalists in charge.
A second important lesson to draw is about the importance of students to the struggle. Many on the socialist left dismiss the idea of organising among students. But Soweto showed how important it is. If socialists had had a base among the students, at least a minority could well have been trained in the struggles they inspired and often organised, and therefore been in a better position to win arguments with militant workers. They might have stood a chance of influencing the workerists, marvellous trade unionists who ultimately lost the battle against the well-oiled machine of the populists.
The student rebellion of Soweto in June 1976 shows very clearly that, while they can’t lead a successful socialist revolution in the way workers can, students can play an important role when workers are on the move. However, in the final accounting, even the most militant and determined students and workers can’t win if they aren’t clear about what they are fighting for and what it will take to win. Revolutionary political organisation therefore remains crucial if we are to defeat capitalism, end racism and win liberation for all.
