The hunger for equality behind a schoolchildren's revolt in South Africa 30 years ago has not yet been satisfied, says David Johnson
Friday June 16, 2006
<snip> This was the first protest in South Africa of any significant scale since the Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s, led by national leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Thambo. The imprisonment of Mandela and other leaders and the banning of organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress in effect silenced mass opposition to the ever increasing inhumanity of the apartheid system. Now, here were school children in an African township, picking up the proud mantle of resistance and showing their collective anger at a brutally unequal system. <snip>
There were many things I did not know. Although I lived within a few miles of Soweto, I had never been there. I grew up in a mixed race community where, for the most part, young people like me tacitly accepted that communities lived apart, divided by law. I had never learned an African language and understood little of the oppressive legislation in force at the time that separated African families: men worked on the mines and lived in single-sex hostels, while many women were employed in the cities as domestics, there only by the grace of a pass book (a kind of passport that African people needed to move between rural settlements into the city centres). <snip>
I returned to South Africa three weeks later, the country still ablaze. I was determined to understand events such as those in Soweto. The following year, I became active in the rapidly growing student movement in the country. A few years later, while based at the University of the Witwatersrand, I was elected its president.
In 1980, I instigated what became a nation-wide boycott of schools. With others, I was arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act. A year later, I led student protests within higher education institutions, leading to various spells in prison and eventually to a five year banning order and house arrest. I was forced to leave South Africa after a warrant for my arrest was issued for furthering the aims of a banned organisation (the ANC). I lived and worked in Botswana but, constantly pursued by the South African security forces and having escaped several attempts on my life, left for Zimbabwe and later the UK. <snip>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1799273,00.html