Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto School Children's Revolt That Shook Apartheid by Baruch Hirson, and: The Road to Soweto Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 by Julian Brown (review)

Although they cover similar historical material, Baruch Hirson's Year of Fire, Year of Ash and Julian Brown's The Road to Soweto Resistance were written in very different contexts. First published in 1979, Hirson's book at the time was a pathbreaking contextualization of the Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976, when the children of Johannesburg's South Western Township (So-we-to) marched to protest the imposition of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium of instruction under the apartheid government's system of Bantu Education. Written in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, and in what must have been a frenetic period for the author given the book's depth of research, the book remains an impressive study of the uprising for its meticulous detail and wealth of resources. Hirson was able to compile the study with the help of international agencies opposed to apartheid, such as the International Defence and Aid Fund, the International University Exchange Fund, and the Counter Information Service, which provided photocopies of banned documents, along with the tutelage of the doyen of South African revisionist history, Shula Marks at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Fittingly, Marks provides the brief foreword for the new edition.

Born in South Africa to Jewish immigrants, Hirson was a Trotskyist imprisoned in 1964 for his role in a sabotage campaign in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960. After his release from prison in 1973 he emigrated to London with his family, where he approached Marks and asked her to supervise his Ph.D. at the University of London. Year of Fire, Year of Ash was the first book-length study of the Soweto Uprising and is a testament to the commitment of Hirson's generation to unearthing an alternative history to the one propagated by the apartheid regime. The result was an entire genre now commonly referred to as "struggle history"—the efforts of predominantly exiled South African scholars to document the historical struggles of black communities against colonialism and apartheid. For Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Ash was also the first publication of what would be a fruitful academic life that produced five monographs and the founding and editing of the journal Searchlight South Africa.

In contrast, Julian Brown's The Road to Soweto is the most recent study of the Soweto Uprising and thus was written in postapartheid South Africa. Drawing on a doctoral thesis and subsequent research, The Road to Soweto is a young historian's contribution to a reassessment of an event that is now celebrated annually on June 16 as Youth Day. Teaching politics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Brown writes from one of the epicenters of the recent "Fees Must Fall" movement, the sustained campaign by South African students for free and decolonized education. This is Brown's second offering; his first book, South Africa's Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics (Zed Books, 2015), is a sustained attempt to conceptualize South Africa's protest culture (which includes the highest number of strikes per year in the world) as a new articulation of "political agency … [,] insisting upon a radical equality within the social order" (3). Indeed, the protests at Wits and around the country feature prominently in both the introduction and conclusion of The Road to Soweto. Brown's books also benefit from archival resources that were not available to...