Nothing is Black and White

Yesterday, June 16, was the African Day of the Child - or, as they simply put it in South Africa, Youth Day. The day commemorates the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising. Soweto was a township - a place reserved for blacks only during apartheid. In 1953, a discriminatory law had been passed - the Bantu Education Act. The law stated, "Natives [blacks] must be taught from an early age that equality with Europeans [whites] is not for them." Hence, black children were taught that they were inferior to whites; their classes were over twice as big as those in white schools, and the black schools' budgets were about one tenth those of whites'. In 1975-6, the South African government passed a new law which stipulated that all classes be taught in Afrikaans. Besides the fact that most teachers in black schools hadn't graduated from high school and couldn't speak Afrikaans themselves, students refused to learn in the language of the oppressors. The rage was at a boiling point; students secretly organized a mass protest, starting from various points in Soweto and convening at Orlando West Secondary School. On June 16, between 15,000 and 20,000 students surprised parents, teachers, and police by beginning a protest march through Soweto.
Not surprisingly, the police were not pleased. Police forces formed a line in front of marching students, ordering them to disperse. The students didn't stop. The police fired tear gas and released police dogs into the crowd. At about the same time students responed by throwing stones and bottles, a police officer pulled out his revolver and fired into the crowd. These were not shots attempting to disperse the crowd; no, these bullets were aimed to kill. The vast majority of students later admitted to hospitals had been shot above the waist, clear evidence of the policemen's intents.
As more and more policemen fired into the mass of young people, the students started to set fire to symbols of apartheid: government buildings and municipal beerhalls went up in flames. Government helicopters responded with tear gas. The rioting continued into the night.
In the morning, the violence continued. It also spread across all of South Africa, from Pretoria to Cape Town. Police were unable to quell the rioters; instead, they simply fired into the crowds. In Soweto, the official death toll was 23. But witnesses place the count at 200, or higher. These brave young students fought - and died - for what they believed in.
Meanwhile, across the border in Botswana, a group of people were protesting in their own way. Maru-a-Pula, a school that did not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or religion, opened in Gaborone, proof that black and white students could study and live in harmony. After the uprising, MaP took on another role. Many students were forced to flee from South Africa after the Soweto riots, and many found safe havens in the homes of MaP teachers. One teacher ran guns from Zimbabwe to the resistance movement in South Africa. Some of South Africa's wanted men and women found refuge at MaP.
Black people were not the only ones to suffer in South Africa. Other non-whites faced extreme discrimination as well. Indians, too, had to live in certain communities; they could not mix with whites or blacks. One Indian woman told me today, "The first time I really questioned what was going on - I'd never questioned the fact that all my neighbors were Indian - was when my family went on holiday to Swaziland. As we were driving, I really had to go to the bathroom. I asked my mother to stop, but she said we couldn't. Yet I could see out the window that we were passing stores with bathrooms. Still my mother said that I couldn't use those bathrooms. The reason: they were for white people only. I then realized that other places - restaurants, stores, not just bathrooms - were segregated. When I moved to Botswana, there was such freedom."
Apartheid wasn't black and white. Nothing ever is.