I was shocked to find so relatively little interest in commemorating this powerful event
The rhythmic tap of iron shod hooves echoes through the cold air as the winter sun rises over the street. It’s June in Soweto, and the sound of a horse cart working its way through the township is unusual, but there are still houses here that use the coal that the man driving the cart sells. The scene may seem picturesque to an outsider, but the cart and its early morning rounds is an echo of a painful past when no one in Soweto had electricity and winter was a time of bitter cold and thick acrid smoke filling the air.
It is how people were forced to live by the apartheid government who regarded black people as ‘temporary sojourners’ in ‘white’ cities. As people who didn’t deserve proper amenities as they were supposed to live elsewhere and were only ‘temporarily’ in Soweto in order to do menial work for whites.
Soweto today is a vibrant community but the sound of the horse cart is reminiscent of that time of oppression and discrimination, that led to the famous Soweto uprising of June 1976. Being forced to study in Afrikaans was the immediate cause of the uprising, but its true roots were in the systematic and deliberate repression that governed every aspect of black peoples’ lives.
I was 15 that year – the same age as many of the students who rose up. and I knew then already that the events of that cold winter were an historic, life-changing moment in history.
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