The official death toll for that Wednesday was 23. Those who were there have told me the real number was several hundred. In 1980, the government-appointed CilliĂ© Commission of Inquiry into the Riots and Soweto and Elsewhere found that âeleven people had been killed in the riotingâ on June 16, with a further two people dying afterwards dying from their injuries. Yet, an appendix to that same report lists nine people as having been killed by police â the youngest just 11 years old â with four succumbing to their wounds later.
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I wanted us to be normal. An impossible ask when the people who raised me were so shaped by an abnormal system. They carried survivorsâ guilt and memories no one should ever have. Sometimes my mum talked to me about the children she had taught before she had left Soweto. The ones who marched on the streets on June 16. She told me about Hector and I knew that he was 12 years old like me. I had seen the photo of him dying. I knew, too, that my mum was on Vilakazi Street that day, along with the kids who called her âTeacherâ and âMaâamâ.
Chapter 1: Umntu Akalahlwa: The Months Before
âIt wasnât enough to see that something was wrong, her grandfather taught her. It was imperative to do something about it.
If you ask my mum today when she first became aware of apartheid, she will tell you it was a teenager, when she became involved with the Black Consciousness movement. But some of her earliest memories are of white police raiding homes in her neighbourhood looking for Black men who did not have permission to be in the area. At eight years old she watched as long lines of men shackled to each other were forced to walk the streets of the township, before being loaded into police vans.
Her grandma, a former domestic worker, had used her entrepreneurial skills to save up and buy a house in the multiracial area of Sophiatown in the years before my mum was born. When police and bulldozers forcibly moved more than 60 000 residents in February of 1955, the Mxakato family was deposited in Sowetoâs Diepkloof Zone 1. Her grandma saved up once more, eventually buying the two-bedroom house that is still the family home. Back then it usually had around 15 people living in it; relatives from the Eastern Cape, friends or people who just needed a place to stay for a while.
Chapter 5: The Deaths They Could Not Grieve: The Aftermath
âIt was Johannesburg's Black daily newspaper The World, where photographer Sam Nzima worked, that printed the photo of Hector dying in Mbuyisa Makhubuâs arms. They almost didnât, as the desk editor was afraid that it might spark civil war. Eventually the paperâs editor, Percy Qoboza, made the decision and the paper placed it on the front page. It earned them a visit from the police, and the photo was banned. Sam was visited by officers at his home.âChoose between our job and your life,â they told him. He left journalism and Johannesburg.
To say that we were missed in Soweto feels like an inadequate and flimsy way of describing the rupturing of hearts and scarring of the souls of those who loved us. For the family in Diepkloof, it followed a series of deep losses, first my great-grandfather, then my great-grandmother, then my mother and me. In Orlando East, the family put on a brave face. Life went on because it had to. They tried to place their grief behind a locked door, but it was still there. We were alive, so my uncles and aunts told themselves they were not grieving. But what else do you call the loss of a child who is the flesh of your flesh, and a sister-in-law who had become like blood? Rakgadi says it is the alternative that would have crushed her; her brother or sister-in-law imprisoned or worse, and me robbed of my parents.