In commemoration of those who lost their lives in 1976 - This was the topic of a poignant and powerful presentation delivered by Professor Elelwani Ramugondo at the Faculty’s commemoration of this year’s Youth Day event to honour those who died during the 1976 Soweto student uprising. The event was an initiative of the Faculty Transformation and Employment Equity Committee in partnership with the Institute of Infectious Disease & Molecular Medicine (IDM).

You may read the full text of Professor  Ramugondo’s Youth Day speech below.

Excerpts from her Youth Day speech can be found below:

It is with deep gratitude that I accepted to speak at today’s event. However, I often get anxious whenever I have to address an audience, which may come as a surprise to many of you. In reflecting on this anxiety, I have grown to appreciate that it comes from a deep respect I hold for any audience I am asked to address. I never want to waste anybody’s time.

 To calm my anxieties, my colleague Professor Roshan Galvaan who is a member of the faculty Transformation and Employment Equity Committee, which organised the event, suggested that I could draw from my keynote address at the recent World Federation of Occupational (WFOT) Congress, which was hosted on African soil for the first time.

 I will certainly use Professor Galvaan’s advice, to the extent that I will bring in relevant aspects to this talk.

You will note that I chose a question, as a title for the talk. This was a deliberate choice, hoping that most of you would not wait, but will seek to answer the question for yourselves before today. It would however be remiss of me, if I did not at the same time, assist in addressing this question today. The answer to the question I pose, ‘Do we remember what they died for? Is quite clear in my mind, and is simply, ‘They died trying to reclaim their dignity’.

The Urban Dictionary tells us that dignity refers to “the state or quality of being worthy of honour or respect”. This is not different at all to what Botho in Sesotho, Vhuthu in Tshivenda and Ubuntu in Nguni also mean. We know that whilst dignity can be afforded an individual or a people, it must also be earned. We also know that an individual can lose honour, respect or dignity through what they do, but we must also appreciate that a people can be stripped of dignity through unjust practices. We see this every day in our lives.  

Now, why do I say that the youth of June 16, 1976 died trying to reclaim their dignity?

Let us return back to what we know or remember about the facts, in specific terms.

What most people remember is that Afrikaans was central in the 1976 Youth Uprisings, which was being imposed on schooling for black South African learners through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. This happens in the context where the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was on the rise, leading to the formation of the South African Students Organisation (SASO), and raising the political consciousness of many students at South African universities.  When Afrikaans was made compulsory, alongside English as a medium of instruction in schools in 1974, students began to mobilise themselves.

Much of the mobilisation towards the historic march of June 16, 1976 happened in high schools, mainly those situated in Soweto. It is believed that between 3000 and 10000 students were mobilised by the South African Students Movement Action Committee, to participate in the mass protest action.

In mobilising other youth, the student leaders had realised that the imposition of Afrikaans, alongside English in their learning, was really about the two dominant groups (Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking white South Africans) fighting for control over cheap black labour. It was very clear to the students that whomever could find easy communication with the black poorly educated masses would enjoy better access to cheap labour; for their mines, gardens and kitchens. Bantu education, reserved for black South Africans who were dispossessed of their land, reduced the black masses to easily exploitable cheap labour. The 1976 youth uprisings, inspired by Black Consciousness Thought, were therefore not really about Afrikaans as a language, but a rejection of the total epistemological framework of Bantu education as a foundation to the broader colonial project. These young people were able to decipher the intentions behind the statement made by H.F Verwoerd, National Party propagandist and political strategist, who was the architect of the Bantu Education Act before he rose to power and served as Prime Minister from 1954 until his assassination in 1966, where he stated;
“There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim, absorption in the European community.”

I will return to this quotation later on.

The youth of 1976 were able to see how their future was locked-in as labourers and servants, just like that of their parents; and refused to accept this as their collective destiny. They were able to join the dots. They were not an unthinking mass, but a group of highly conscious and agentic young people. They could not accept that they could simply be denied their sense of dignity, in the land of their birth and ancestry.  

Often, when people in the global South gather and participate in mass action to register their grievances against the state, their actions are described as riots or strikes. Yet these descriptions are rarely ascribed to mass action in Europe or the United Kingdom, except when drunken football fans get out of hand.  

Importantly, the June 16, 1976 Youth Uprisings exposed the brutality of the state, and helped mobilise the world against Apartheid South Africa. The lesson to be learnt here is that state repression never goes unpunished, however long it takes.

It is reported that the June 1976 student activists descended upon Orlando Stadium in eleven columns, and that it was a peaceful mass action. When the march was halted by the police, one of the youth leaders, Tietsi Mashinini was helped up a tractor so that everyone could see him when he addressed the crowd. It is believed he said the following to the crowd:

“Brothers and Sisters, I appeal to you - keep calm and cool. We have just received a report that the police are coming. Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool and calm. We are not fighting.”

It is reported that the students continued to march until they arrived at what is currently known as Hector Petersen Square, close to Orlando High School. The march was again brought to a halt by the police. There are different reports about what then ensued, and led to the first shooting. One report narrates:

"Despite the tense atmosphere the students remained calm and well ordered. Suddenly a white policeman lobbed a teargas canister into the front of the crowd. People ran out of the smoke dazed and coughing. The crowd retreated slightly but remained facing the police, waving placards and singing. A white policeman drew his revolver. Black journalists standing by the police heard a shot: "Look at him. He's going to shoot at the kids". A single shot ran out. There was a split seconds silence and pandemonium broke out. Children screamed. More shots were fired. At least four students fell and others ran screaming in all directions”.

There are conflicting reports about the number of fatalities that resulted from shootings associated with June 16, 1976. While some cite the death toll on the first day to be 23, others refer to a figure of 200, resulting from the fact that June 16 incidents triggered widespread violence throughout South Africa, which claimed many lives. Consistent across many reports is that the first student to be shot on that fateful day was 15-year old Hastings Ndlovu. Hector Pieterson, whose image as a dying child in the arms of another, captured by photo journalist Sam Masana Nzima, and is the most famous reminder of June 16 and South African youth activism, was killed on that same day. These young people, and those whose names will never be known, denied of a sense of dignity, died trying to reclaim it.   

There are many who die, simply trying to reclaim their sense of dignity, beyond those who perished as part of the 1976 youth mass action. Even after 1994, we have seen how this continues in a constitutional democracy like South Africa. In August 16, 2012, the South African Police Service fired live ammunition on a crowd of striking mineworkers at Marikana, in the North West Province. While 78 suffered serious injuries, 34 mineworkers died. They too died trying to reclaim their dignity.

Unless we are reminded about such events, we tend to forget. This is recognised as collective amnesia. Again, the urban dictionary becomes handy, defining amnesia as ‘whole or partial loss of memory’. This can happen at an individual, but also at a collective level. At a collective level, we can lose our sense of history. Often we remember bits, and not the whole. We are often lulled into collective amnesia. How does this happen? In our faculty, the Faculty of Health Sciences, we do a fair share of dulling pain for individuals. We understand bodily pain, and sometimes even psychic pain. In general life however, people are made to forget the painful and ugly truth of our history, through words. A clever use of words can simply make people pay attention to some things, and not others. Mikhail Bakhtin makes this poignant in saying that language is over-populated with intentions. As human beings we are constantly in interaction with words, directing us into seeing the world one way or another. We have to be careful about these words, because intentions behind some of them may not be as noble or as harmless as we think. Celebration is one such word we need to be careful about.  But before anyone jumps onto the necks of our event organisers, I must just tell you that it is not their fault that today is dubbed Youth Day Celebration. The Department of Arts and Culture’s website refers to Youth Day Celebration - with regards to June 16 as a Public Holiday. They were probably advised to do so by the constitutionalists. The same people perhaps that envisioned us as a Rainbow Nation. The danger with these feel-good words is that they deceive us into no longer seeing reality as IS, until our collective amnesia or tunnel-vision is knocked out of us, through protest for example.

This is not to say that we cannot celebrate Youth Day, but in doing so, we should be clear about what of June 16 we are celebrating, instead of turning this day into yet another deeply commercialised South African Public Holiday. We need to recognise that as a youthful country, with about 37% of our population being young people, and current unemployment for those between 15 and 34 years old at 58%, we may be a ticking bomb. Our young people know that beyond votes, we do not care about them. Instead we give them labels that are problematic, like ‘The lost generation’, ‘Generation X or ‘Generation Y’. We have even referred to them as ‘Child soldiers’, without paying attention to why young people are easily thrown into desperation, such that the only way to survive is to shoot back.

In celebrating Youth Day, we need to remember the role the youth of 1976 played in helping us understand how education can be used to further the broad colonial project.  

This is where I return to Verwoerd’s quote,

“There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim, absorption in the European community.”

Four decades later, students through the Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcing movements, again joined the dots and refused to accept that they should be absorbed or assimilated into a dysfunctional and exploitative global community through a mostly Eurocentric and commodified higher education. Whilst there is nothing wrong with any region of the world expanding itself, there is everything wrong with this happening at the expense of other nations, and through pillaging local resources. Students during 2015, 2016 and 2017, were able to remind us about historical injustices that define our current realities of rampant inequality. To this end, Tanya Bosch described the Rhodes Must Fall campaign as “a collective project of resistance against normative memory production”. Central to the campaign, was exposing the myth of the Rainbow Nation. The lesson here is that if we continue to be deaf to the concerns of young people, we call upon ourselves further protests, as justifiable wake-up calls from our collective amnesia.

We need not wait to be reminded, and I believe we have a few pointers to learn from. This is where aspects from my WFOT keynote address become relevant, where I referred to three women who have much to teach us about attending to issues of social justice, which inadvertently affect our youth.  

The first exceptional leader is Mam Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who throughout her life demonstrated true courage in working with youth from the oppressed masses in Apartheid South Africa, striving for liberation. To her, poor black youth were never a problem.

Another iconic leader is academic activist Angela Davis, who notes poignantly, and I quote:  “the message we receive from politicians and from the interminable series of crime programs on television is that we need not be afraid of unemployment, homelessness, the deterioration of conditions in poor communities; they endlessly suggest that we need not be afraid of war and the environmental degradation caused by business and military operations, but we should be afraid of crime and those who are represented as its most likely perpetrators”.  

In thinking about the most likely perpetrator, it is important that we recognise that we often think of these as ‘the Other’ or ‘the stranger’, until our own family members are on the receiving end of such prejudice. We must therefore look closely at those who are usually labelled, as depicted on the slide. In many ways, they are ‘us’.

The third leader worth mentioning here is medical historian Julie Livingston, whose conceptualisation of ‘debility’ encompasses disability, but also goes beyond it. Livingston highlights debility as a concept that allows for more permeability and mobility in and out of a sense of personhood, regardless of the presence or absence of impairment. In this way, diagnosing impairment on the body does not separate human beings, but only serves to facilitate access to appropriate care. This is important for us across health professions, and not only a concern for medics. In diagnosing an illness, impairment or dysfunction that may lead to disability, we need to be conscious of the power we hold in dividing people simply between those with a disability and those without. As Livingston suggests, “Debility - the impairment, lack or loss of certain bodily abilities – is on one level, a profound challenge to personhood. But debility also has a history, in the sense that impairment and disfigurement often arise out of a particular historical juncture – for example, the rise of mining and mining accidents, wars, or violence in societies that may not even be at war, in the military sense. This understanding of debility gives us insight into people’s sense of historical experience and changing assumptions about personhood and self”. This understanding of debility, that is located in history, is fundamental to our understanding of critical factors that have changed the ways in which people see each other, and care for one another.

I took the opportunity in giving the WFOT keynote address, to allow three voices to share their insights and offer a critique of my profession, occupational therapy. It is not often that we really engage with how others outside of our professions see us, especially fellow colleagues within and outside our faculty. Such engagements are important, if we are to find intersections for healing work; necessary for addressing historical injustices.

Another voice, not represented in the video clip you have just observed, emerges from a collaboration with colleagues from Drama for Life, a program which is based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. These colleagues are Refiloe Lepere and Warren Nebe. Our collaboration has led to a publication in the journal ‘Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality’. The paper is titled, ‘Decolonising stigma and diagnosis as healing work’ and argues for stigma to be addressed from both within and beyond the realm of medical diagnosis, and in ways that allow for a decolonial approach to health practice, research, and education. Hearing voices, for example, need not mean mental illness or debility. Hearing voices, could be a human experience that finds expression in both those who are distressed by the voices, and those who find them calming. Along this continuum, there is sufficient room to move between debility and well-being. These voices, could also be from our heroes and heroines, who died trying to reclaim their sense of dignity, and simply refuse to be forgotten!