By 1975, many of the artists, musicians, journalists, poets and writers who shaped and coloured the resistance to apartheid in the 1960s had gone into exile. Political leaders had been silenced and locked away.
Life for the black majority in South Africa was a relentless series of obstacles and hoops from before dawn – usually 4.30am, when people woke in the dark to catch buses with hard seats – to after dusk, at around 7.30pm, when workers returned to smoke-filled, badly lit, dangerous streets.
Controlled access to the sprawling township of Soweto through four entrances (and exits) was specifically designed by the state to easily contain the area. In the mid-1970s, South Africa suffered a depression leaving more than half of its residents unemployed or underemployed.
Everything mattered: where you lived, how you travelled, which job you were allowed to hold and where you could eat and drink in public. 1975 was the year the government introduced Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in all schools for at least half of the subjects.
A different country
The 16 June 1976 march by scholars resisting the imposition of Afrikaans, which claimed the lives of at least 200 young people, sparked countrywide uprisings and made Soweto an emblem of resistance.
The slaughter drew world headlines as the violence spread across the country, making Prime Minister John Vorster’s National Party government and the racist Republic of South Africa a world pariah.
The date marked the start of the throttling of the apartheid state, already mired in moral and political decay. The aftermath of 16 June was unstoppable. Young South Africans today would not recognise that other country, that past, and thankfully so.
It was the voices of the black consciousness movement that stirred and ignited passions and courage in the vacuum created by the exiled and the incarcerated.
The historical moment
Student leader Steve Biko was one of the movement’s most recognisable political and intellectual faces, while the “Soweto poets” (who eschewed the label) – Mafika Pascal Gwala, Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, James Matthews, Sipho Sepamla, Webster Makaza and Meshack Hlongwane – were its verbal spears, its cultural weapons.
The funeral service of poet James Matthews (95) at St Georges Cathedral on September 21, 2024 in Cape Town. The renowned poet worked against South Africa's repressive and racist system of apartheid, which resulted in him being relentlessly harassed, detained by police and his work banned. (Photo by Gallo Images/Brenton Geach) With no space to contain the bubbling rage, it was words, music and theatre that spread the seeds of resistance and solidarity. Gwala recalled the atmosphere of the time as one of “intellectual slaughter, tinged with deep, ever-building and brooding anger”.
Traditional theatres and venues were segregated, shutting out black performers and artists. So, performances took place at mass rallies, clandestine meetings and endless funerals. “Soweto was a culminating point in a lonely and grisly blow-for-blow contestation by the black resistance movement against racism and class exploitation. The whole of South Africa was ‘Soweto’. June 16 spilled over to all across the country,” Gwala, who died in 2014, noted in an interview with Thengamehlo Ngwenya in Staffrider magazine in 1989.
Well-known South African author Oswald Mtshali at his home in Soweto in 2007. (Photo: Mlandeli Puzi / Gallo Images) Key role of student organisations
Biko and Gwala were both arrested in state clampdowns on the black consciousness movement in 1977. The poet spent six months in detention. Port Elizabeth security police tortured Biko for 20 days. He died on 11 September 1977 while being driven 700km to Pretoria in the back of a police van, bruised, naked and shackled.
Staffrider later published Gwala’s Jol’iinkomo volume of poetry, which the state immediately banned. Jol’iinkomo is also a battle song originally from Pondoland and was made popular by exiled jazz diva Miriam Makeba.
Gwala was a founder member of the Medu Arts Ensemble, an anti-apartheid cultural collective that included Nkathazo ka Mnyayiza and Ben Dikobe Martins. In fact, it was their flame and fire that led to the establishment of Staffrider with Mike Kirkwood of Ravan Press.
The South African Students Organisation was founded in 1968 under the guidance of Biko in the then Natal. At its conference in 1971, the organisation invited artists to join students for a two-week workshop about cultural revival as part of the black consciousness movement’s vision for the oppressed black majority.
Cultural revival
The relentless assault on black life, said Gwala, had called “for some kind of common identity and mutual understanding among people of colour” and this could be achieved by “understanding the values, ideas and images that tied us to our social functions”.
John Kani at a book launch at Exclusive Books Rosebank on 23 October 2024 in Johannesburg (Photo: Oupa Bopape / G…
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