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Following the election of Nelson Mandela as State President of the Republic of South Africa in 1994, the sixteenth of June was declared an official state holiday —National Youth Day. Over the previous eighteen years, June 16 had become an unofficial holiday for Blacks, a day dedicated to commemorating the sacrifices of the struggle against apartheid as symbolized in the 1976 police shootings of schoolchildren marching in protest through the streets of Soweto (Johannesburg’s SOuth WEstern TOwnships). For most Whites the day had become little more than a predictable disruption of work, a day when the normally ubiquitous Black labor was largely absent. With the end of exclusively White rule, however, the new government sought to transform June 16 (and a whole host of other formerly Black or formerly White institutions) into a symbol for a single, unified nation. Celebrations of Youth Day were supposed to be symbols of the rhetorical themes of the Government of National Unity, an opportunity to reclaim stories of division and make them serve a diverse, but national, unity. June 16 was again chosen as a site for this transformation project in 1999, when it was called into service for the inauguration of Thabo Mbeki as the second State President of the “New South Africa.” As one newspaper editorial put it, This time round all South Africans, black and white, will be celebrating a new day; a day that liberated not just blacks but whites as well from the bondage of apartheid. When President Mbeki steps down from the podium on Wednesday, we must all help him to attain his greatest wish: to be president of One Nation, not two nations. 16 June will never be the same day again.1 65 Chapter Four Soweto 1976 This chapter examines June 16 as an icon of the transformation of the South African social order by looking into the discourse that has surrounded it and defined its meanings.2 It analyzes how this symbol has been presented, interpreted , and commemorated in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. The stories that came to define the events of June 16, 1976, empowered many South Africans, especially young Black South Africans, to change their relationship to the apartheid state. This alteration in the relationship is, I argue, accessible through the politics and the power of the identity labels South Africans have used to define those associated with the events of June 16. This chapter analyzes the competing discourses on Soweto by focusing on these descriptive labels. For most of its life as an icon, June 16 was intimately interwoven with and often synonymous with Soweto, not as a geographic space, but as an event. An examination of the power of Soweto should begin with the “facts” of the case—those elements upon which the various stories seem to agree. SOWETO, JUNE 16, 1976—A STORY The sixteenth of June 1976 began as another mundane late autumn Wednesday in Soweto. The morning air was thick with the smoke from tens of thousands of coal fires, and people trudged to the portals of the wealthy White city where they sold their labor. The only ones particularly anxious would have been the teenagers who had organized a march to protest a decision to enforce a longstanding rule governing the language in which their classes were taught. Since the 1950s, Black students had been studying Afrikaans as a required subject (and this continued until after the 1994 elections), but the policy of using Afrikaans to teach half of the nonlanguage subjects in Black postprimary education, the socalled 50–50 rule, lay dormant until a mid-1970s change in leadership at the Transvaal Department of Bantu Education. In Soweto, a small number of junior secondary students were being forced to take their mathematics and social studies tests in Afrikaans, a language in which most were barely conversant and that many considered repugnant. Students from other schools empathized and knew that they would soon face the same prospect. Frustrated in repeated attempts to stop the policy or even to express their grievances to the authorities, the children had coordinated a march. The march had been planned by an Action Committee composed of two delegates from each junior and secondary school in Soweto.3 In order to confuse the police, students were instructed to leave from a dozen assembly points, each with its own departure time, and move toward Orlando West, where they planned to meet and then proceed to a soccer stadium...

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