40th Anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings

It was 40 years ago today that the Soweto Uprisings began, and hastened the end of apartheid.

Following the uprisings, there was a growing feeling among all South Africans that apartheid as a system could not be long sustained. 

What happened was that the Nationalist Party government, which was dominated by the conservative Afrikaners, wanted to spread the Afrikaans language to the native black population. So, the Bantu Education Department (Bantu was the official term used by the Afrikaner government to describe the native, or black, population) passed a regulation mandating that Afrikaans was to be one of the languages officially used for the education of blacks. 

But blacks saw Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor, and they resisted. In Soweto, a planned protest to take place at the Orlando football stadium at 7am was starting to get crowded already by 6am. 

There were clashes with the police, and these clashes continued not just for days, but for the weeks and months that followed. Violent clashes continued throughout the remainder of 1976 and went well into 1977, so that it came to be a routine part of everyday life for blacks in townships such as Soweto. 

It was the first time that much of South Africa witnessed the new youth movement, and many found it alarming that these youth did not place as much of an emphasis on nonviolent resistance as had Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the 1950's and 1960's. Youth wanted changes, wanted to see major reforms in the country, and they were no longer willing to simply wait for it. It was not long before they began to be armed with AK-47's and other weaponry, which they used in the clashes with police. 

This was the era of Stephen Biko, who was a strong activist leader, but who was eventually taken into police custody, where he died under mysterious, and rather suspicious, circumstances, with strong evidence that he had been severely beaten and mistreated by the police. 

While many blacks had remained opposed to apartheid, there was relative (and perhaps surprising) calm following the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, which was followed by the arrest of Mandela and other prominent anti-apartheid leaders later in the decade. But the Soweto Uprisings changed all of that, and the sense that the cost of maintaining apartheid might be too high of a cost to bear for a white minority government increasingly isolated and heavily criticized by the rest of the world began to make many whites feel that reforms really were necessary and urgent. 

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Soweto Uprisings, and it seems fair to say that South Africa was never the same.