Soweto uprising 16th June 1976

Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo after being shot by the South African police. His sister Antoinette Sithole, runs besides them. Pieterson was rushed to a local clinic and declared dead on arrival. This photo by Sam Nzima became an icon of the uprising.

Antoinette Sithole, Hector Pieterson’s sister finds that school children want to touch her to see if she is real, once they have heard the story of 16th June 1976.

”they find it unbelievable”she says, on that fateful day, police opened fire on thousands of school children who were protesting against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in township schools. Hector was the first child to die on the day, in uprisings that spread across Soweto and the country in 1976. By the end of the year, there had been more than 500 deaths around the country.

Tensions in schools had been going from February 1976 when two teachers at meadowlands Tswana schools board were dismissed for refusing to teach in Afrikaans. Efforts to make representations to the education authorities were rebuffed, and in mid-way about a dozen schools went on strike, with several students refusing to write mid-year exams.

On 16th June, students from three schools, Belle Higher primary, Phenfeni junior secondary, and Morris Isaacson high, marched but before they got to the stadium the police met them, in Moema street. No one knows who gave the first command to shoot, but soon children were running in all directions. Some were lying wounded and dying on the ground.

After the photograph was released, Makhubu was harassed by the security services, and was forced to flee South Africa. His mother, Nombuleo Markhubu told the truth and reconciliation commission that she received a letter from him, from Nigeria in 1978, but that she had not heard from him since. She died in 2004 seemingly without knowledge of what had happened to her son.

Mbuyisa was one of a number of South African activists given refuge in Nigeria immediately following the Soweto incident. He was one of three who were settled in a boarding high school in South Western Nigeria federal government college, during the 1976-1977 academic year. However they all failed to settle, and had moved on within the year.

As of 2020, his whereabouts still remain unknown. The same year a four episode documentary titled through the cracks, which was released on 44th anniversary of the uprising on June 16th 2020, provided some previously untold details about Makhubu’s life.