Soweto—turning point in South Africa freedom struggle

We reprint this article from the June 25, 1976, issue of Workers World as part of our archival series. The article was written by Sharon Shelton.

New York City, June 23–After years of living under the brutal yoke of apartheid rule, the people of Azania (South Africa) have risen up against their oppressors in what is surely a major turning point in the struggle for freedom in southern Africa.

The historic rebellion erupted in the impoverished Black township of Soweto last Wednesday when South African Premier John Vorster’s fascist police began shooting pointblank into a crowd of 10,000 students protesting a law requiring they take courses in Afrikaans, the language spoken by the South African white minority.

By week’s end, the uprising had quickly swept through other Black urban areas. So far, by official count, at least 140 Africans, mostly children, have been killed and over 1,100 injured by apartheid sharpshooters. Over 900 protesters have been arrested.

The Vorster regime has now turned a new weapon against the Black townships: starvation. All food supplies to the areas of rebellion have been cut off.

Originally organized as peaceful movement

Wednesday’s demonstration was originally organized as a peaceful march to be followed by a rally in Soweto’s Orlando Stadium. Before the marchers reached the stadium, however, they were met by a contingent of police who demanded they disperse, lobbing teargas into the crowd.

Although Vorster’s Gestapo cops claim they did not shoot to kill until the students began throwing rocks, an on-the-scene reporter for the Johannesburg Star has vowed he saw the police initiate even the stone throwing.

The youths responded to the vicious police attack, however, with a fury kindled by years of oppression. They overturned police cars, burned government and other buildings symbolizing apartheid, and defended themselves with their fists, stones and sticks.

Killed for “crime” of not stopping his car

As the protests spread to at least seven other segregated townships, the police rampaged, using attack dogs, army helicopters, tear gas, machine guns, grenade launchers and automatic rifles in their random attacks on any unarmed Black people who happened to be in their path. One man, according to Saturday’s issue of the New York Times, was shot to death after “his car failed to halt on command” at a police roadblock.

In the township of Mabopane, the demonstration began after 170 Black workers at the Klipgat waterworks struck for higher wages. In Pretoria, African Chrysler workers staged a walkout after the plant halted the supplementary breakfasts that had been instituted over the weekend when food supplies to the townships were cut off.

According to yesterday’s New York Times, a Black man took the rebellion directly to the forbidden streets of Johannesburg when he attacked three people with an ax, shouting “Freedom for Africa!” He was later shot.

Also in Johannesburg there were confrontations between racist troopers and Africans when a group of Soweto residents in the bus station trying to get transportation home were charged by club-wielding cops.

There also have been demonstrations at the University of Zululand at Empangeni in Natal province and at the University of the North at Turloop near Petersburg. Police attacked both demonstrations, composed of Black students chanting “Power!”

In a hopeful show of solidarity rare for South Africa, 200 white students at the University of the Witwaterstrand organized an action to protest the police rampage in Soweto and other Black townships.

White students show solidarity

Demonstrators carried replicas of coffins and signs reading, “Why shoot children–they are the future?” According to the New York Times, “White and Black bystanders joined them as they passed, swelling their numbers to more than 1,000 by the time they approached the downtown area.” The solidarity protest was later attacked by the police with clubs. White students at the University of the Cape also held demonstrations against the killings of the Black school children.

The Vorster regime’s response to the viciousness of its killer cops has been typically calloused. Today the hated James T. Kruger, who as Minister of “Justice” gave the cops their orders, was quoted in the Times as describing the ongoing police terror in African areas as “mopping-up operations.” He defended the mass shootings by casually suggesting other methods would have proved “ineffective.”

Vorster himself, a pro-Nazi activist during World War II, went on television and radio warning his regime “would not be intimidated” and preaching “law and order.” Vorster’s warning, coming only days before his scheduled meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, underscores the fact that the U.S. has all along propped up the apartheid regime. Although Kissinger has hypocritically stated he “regrets” what has happened in South Africa, he has refused to call off the talks, which are aimed at safeguarding U.S. interest in southern Africa, especially after the recent people’s victory in Angola.

U.S. vested interest in apartheid

Currently over 300 U.S. corporations operate within South Africa. Big U.S. corporations, lured by the starvation wages Black workers are paid, have invested over $1 billion in the apartheid-ruled country. Firms like Chrysler, Caterpillar, Firestone, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Goodyear, IBM, IT&T, Mobil Oil and Caltrex have a vested interest in apartheid-as-usual.

Of course, the Pretoria government is also important to the U.S. as a battering ram against People’s Angola (as was illustrated by South Africa’s invasion on behalf of U.S. imperialism of that newly independent country last November) as well as against the Namibian, Zimbabwean and Azanian revolutions.

Massacre reminiscent of Sharpeville

In the vehemence with which Vorster’s fascist police have indiscriminately fired upon unarmed Africans, this week’s historic uprising is reminiscent of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 when over 70 peaceful protesters against the hated passbook system were mercilessly shot down.

The difference between today and Sharpeville, however, is that the intervening years of continuous brutal racism, coupled with inspiring people’s victories elsewhere in Africa, have made apartheid intolerable to its victims. Now, the oppressed African masses, though unarmed, are turning a new page in the history of southern Africa by their proven fierce determination to fight back by any means necessary until the brutal system of apartheid is destroyed and the imperialist profiteers are banished from their soil.