“Tell Them I Said Something”

Last year a group of friends and I got up on a bitterly cold winter morning and joined Metro FM's Walk For Freedom – an event held on June 16, 2011 to commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, as well as the radio station's twenty-five years on air. We gathered at Morris Isaacson High School where Tsietsi Mashinini had led that first group of protesters all those years ago, and I was awed by the turnout so early in the morning on a public holiday. Young people who had given up the warmth of their beds to relive that historic act of defiance, to remember the fallen and perhaps to rediscover their own militant voice.

The march was led, naturally, by Metro FM deejays. But it was not for very long. As soon as we started walking, the deejays lost what little control they had of the crowd and we came alive. Galvanised by the nostalgia of struggle songs and the politically charged spirit of the time (it was shortly after the local government elections, and during the Julius Malema “Shoot The Boer” debacle) we came into our own. Factions broke out amongst us as some of the more energetic and more enthusiastic comrades marched way ahead of the laggards in the back and the moderate walkers in the middle. Soon each faction had its own identified leaders – those with the loudest and best singing voices – and we followed their cue relentlessly. We sang “ayesaba amagwala /dubula dubula” with wanton abandon and complete disregard of its status as a banned song. We were defiant, as if channeling the spirit of those fallen heroes we had come to honour.

We walked the thirteen or so kilometre route, taking in the sights and sounds of Soweto that included the relatively comfortable middle class homes, whose excited occupants would occasionally come out to cheer us on and join in a revolutionary song or two. I even heard one lady tease her five-year old daughter with the words “O no le kae?” as we toyi-toyi'd past her house. We passed a South African Breweries truck parked outside a bottle store and jokingly threatened to upturn it, calling it “the people's truck”. The mood was jovial and full of mirth, colluding with the bright winter sunlight to belie the frigid conditions of the day and underlying internal struggles that each of us suffered through daily, and I could not help but wonder what it was like on that winter's day in 1976. As we neared historic Vilakazi Street, we saw the spot where it is said Hector Peterson was gunned down. A monument of stone had been erected to mark the place, and had been duly covered with graffiti.

When we arrived at Phefeni Junior Secondary School – the place where the march was brought to an abrupt halt under a hail of gunfire and tear gas - we were treated to incoherent babble from some youth leaders and saucy dancing to equally incoherent music from Chomee and her chommies. This may have been a technical issue, but the general lack of interest in the youth leader's message and voyeuristic glee that swept through the crowd for the kwaito star's performance reminded me that Nelson Mandela once called us the “Boom Shaka generation”, pointing to loose morals and lack of civil activism amongst us – preferring instead to gorge ourselves on the pop culture boom of the nineties. Indeed, those were euphoric times, and we all assumed the transition would be a smooth one and so we took our collective eyes off the ball for a minute, choosing the decadence of the party over the assiduous diligence of a youth invested in its own future. But it would be folly to think this is true about all the youth of South Africa today. Not eighteen years since the advent of democracy, when there is still very little change to the majority of young people's lives. The impact of the horrible tragedy that is June 16, 1976, amongst others, is indelibly etched in our DNA. As Jay Naidoo recently put it, “Soweto 1976 was our Tahrir square.”. It is a moment in our history that reminds us that though we may be younger than those in power, we have within us the potential to effect monumental change.

So why then, if we are so powerful, are we being marginalised and treated like a focus group that requires special programs and a special ministry? There are roughly eighteen million South Africans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five – that is about thirty-six percent of the total population of the entire country. The rest of the population is made up of the old and the very young, at thirty-one percent apiece. By anyone's calculus, this makes the youth the clear majority, and so every national program should, ultimately, benefit us. This idea that the older generations who are in power are laying the foundation and building a better South Africa for the youth who are the future is a baffling one. Which youth exactly do they speak of? And when is this youth meant to reap this boon sprouting from the benevolence of our elders? When we too are too old to enjoy it? We are here, now. Surely, we should be partners in this building project?

The daily struggle to keep mind, body and spirit together stands in the way to true liberation. We are forced, daily, to operate in a system that we don't quite understand, that is not of our making and benefits too few of us to be of any real use to any of us. When those lionhearted young heroes stood up to those caspirs and the tear gas and the live ammunition, they were fighting against the further dislocation of their understanding of their reality by having it explained to them in a language that, to this day, still holds oppressive tones in some of our ears. But the damage had already been done. Bantu Education had been steadily working on keeping black people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum for some twenty-odd years by the time of the uprising. The knock-on effects on later generations have produced a youth that is ill-equipped with the tools required to succeed in the deceptively inclusive society of today.

We are so used to having policy defined for us from above, that we have little, if any, input into the processes that create these policies. But in 1976, twenty thousand children of school-going age stood up and said we will not be dictated to. They found in themselves the wherewithal to question and protest against a policy handed down from above, to which their adult teachers were ready to acquiesce – teachers who held hallowed and revered status in the community. But we, the current generation, find ourselves besieged on all sides with no clear enemy.

We, ourselves, are by no means a homogenous bunch – our diversity and competing needs are, perhaps, an albatross around our necks that keeps us from mobilising effectively as was done on that fateful day. The privilege some of us have had the good fortune to find ourselves in these past eighteen years insulates us from the dire situation our contemporaries in, for instance, rural South Africa find themselves in, where even the most basic freedoms are curtailed by a myriad of economic impediments. What we do have in common, though, is a growing realisation that the status quo is not doing any of us any favours.

This year, no doubt, the day will be commemorated all over the country. There will be the usual rallies in randomly selected cities and towns around the country, with the same messages and pearls of wisdom from our elders. There will be the popular school uniform parties held in almost every township in South Africa. And the day will pass, and we will all suffer a collective rhetoric- and alcohol-induced hangover, and go on with our lives. But maybe, if the rumblings on the streets and in certain halls of power continue, this year will see a revolution – be it a private revolution in each of us that moves one to empower oneself or another. Or a massively mobilised phenomenon similar to the Arab Spring. Perhaps that is too ambitious. I am sure of one thing though, and that is if the commemorative Walk For Freedom that I participated in last year is anything to go by, the young are indeed restless and any artificial power held over them will eventually crumble and we will grab hold of our destinies and begin to chart a new course.

[written 30 April 2012 for Loocha magazine's June 2012 issue and posted in full without further edits]