June 16 was the invoice for our democracy — 50 years on, it remains unpaid

The road to 27 April 1994, Freedom Day in South Africa, started on the dusty streets of Soweto on 16 June 1976. Had Hector Pieterson not been shot dead that morning he would be a relatively young 62 today. That fact alone – 50 missed years of living – tells us how much he and other youngsters sacrificed in the service of freedom.

Mark Heywood is a social justice activist and former Editor of Maverick Citizen, a section of Daily Maverick. He is the former executive director and founder of SECTION27 and has been a human rights activist most of his life. He has also advised Change Starts Now and Rise Mzansi on issues of social justice, and is a co-founder of the Union Against Hunger.

Several weeks ago I was fortunate to attend the opening of an academic conference organised by Wits University and the University of Johannesburg to celebrate and study the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and the protests it catalysed across South Africa. In a packed Senate Room in Solomon Mahlangu House, the opening panel was made up of four veteran activists – Seth Mazibuko, Saths Cooper, Nozipho Diseko and Sibongile Mkhabela. All four were on the ground in June 1976: organising, teaching, or, as students, caught up in the melee.

The four spoke with remarkable modesty. Their relative youth and intellectual vigour give the lie to any idea that 16 June 1976 is part of a dim and distant past.

They looked back 50 years, not in heroic nostalgia, not in the language of political cliches, not even with rancour, but with deep human insights expressed in plain language. Their words conveyed the poetry of heart-felt emotion and unresolved trauma. They had the legitimacy of witness.

They exhibited none of the pomposity we have come to associate with Struggle braggarts.

None of the brittle sensitivity of leaders who know they have betrayed the values of liberation and so have to overemphasise their Struggle credentials.

In fact, there was a rare spirit in the air that evening: the ancestors of June 16th past.

As one speaker put it “June 16th was the invoice for our democracy”.

Ironically, they contrasted their schools then, hotbeds of learning and teaching, with the lamentable state of the same schools now.

They juxtaposed the passion of rebellion with the defeat that young people feel today.

They lamented a crisis of a different kind that faces “the class of 2026” and other young people.

A day later, at a meeting of the Union Against Hunger, an elderly resident of Soweto observed dejectedly: “Looking around our locations you just see sadness in the face of children. They are no