About the Book
On 16 June 1976, students from secondary schools across Soweto marched through the township towards Orlando Stadium. They planned a peaceful procession and gathering to demonstrate their opposition to the government’s plan to change the medium of instruction in their schools from Afrikaans to English. Many of the students believed that this would be a carnivalesque occasion, filled with laughter and the reversal of social norms. This was not to be.
In the early hours of the morning, the South African police began to gather at street corners along the student’s route. At 11am a group of between thirty and fifty policemen confronted a large crowd of students. The students were singing, whistling at the police, and brandishing placards. In a moment, though, this changed. Hector Pieterson, and his image was flashed across the world, becoming an emblem of the apartheid state’s brutality and cruelty. In this moment, a decade of struggle became visible.
About the Author
Julian Brown is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of South Africa�s Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics in South Africa (Jacana, 2015), as well as of a number of scholarly articles on South African politics, history and socio-legal studies. He completed a DPhil in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2009.
