I Saw a Nightmare . . .': Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976)

“I SAW A NIGHTMARE . . .”: VIOLENCE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY

(SOWETO, JUNE 16, 1976)1

HELENA POHLANDT-MCCORMICK

ABSTRACT

The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the impositionof Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most pro-found challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in acontext of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn intoa discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological andpolitical reasons with little regard for how language and its absence—silences—furtherviolated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursiveshape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and openquestions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or publichistories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures—and sources—thatproduced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses thecollusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that—while the collusionbetween violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of indi-viduals to think historically—the individual historical actor can and does have the will tocontest and engage with collective memory and official history.

The body can be maimed in many ways, not only through mutilation.2

I. INTRODUCTION

Violence experienced at the hands of the state or, as the consequence of brutal statepolicies within society, has become an essential element of historical memory inSouth Africa. Its effects—physical destruction of and injury to bodies and minds—and the secrets, lies, and silences that accompanied it, threatened the basic abilityof individuals to think historically, with immense consequences for collective pub-lic history. This article grapples with questions about the relationship between theexperience of violence, memory, and the creation of history, arguing that beyondthe experience of actual physical violence lies a form of discursive, rhetorical vio-

History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 23-44 © Wesleyan University 2000 ISSN: 0018-2656

1. Parts of Lilli Mokganyetsi’s story and its analysis were published in my article, written withMichelle Mouton, “Boundary Crossings: Oral History of Nazi Germany and Apartheid SouthAfrica—a Comparative Perspective,” History Workshop Journal 48 (1999), 54-60. My thanks toHistory Workshop Journal for permission to reuse the material here. My thanks also to MichelleMouton, Michael McCormick, and Nadja Krämer.

2. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, 1991), 101.

lence that continues to do harm in the minds of people, and that disrupts the abil-ity to find continuity and meaning. If sufficiently pervasive and enduring, this vio-lence moves beyond the harm to individuals and coalesces in collective memoriesand official histories—which may be in tension with one another, as they were forso long in South Africa—and returns to haunt the future in new forms of physicalviolence. In a recent book on Argentina’s Dirty War junta (1976–1983),Marguerite Feitlowitz asked “[w]hen known torturers are said to be heroes, whathappens to the minds of those they injured?”3 My work similarly considers thedamage done, individually and collectively, when those who did the physical vio-lence erased the histories of their victims and contrived to create a history thatdenied their culpability: when violence and silence acted in collusion with eachother. While this systematic collusion between violence and silence in SouthAfrica is evident and observable, certain questions need to be examined rather thansimply assumed as given. My analysis tries to reveal some of the processes andconsequences of this collusion, investigates why it becomes necessary, and illus-trates by way of individual example why it was never fully successful.

The stories and histories of the Soweto Uprising provide a striking example ofthis collusion between violence and silence. An analysis of the creation of his-torical meaning through official narratives (government and ANC) will provideinsight both into the processes of and necessity for this collusion, and will showthat even historical narratives contribute to the fateful alliance. It will becomeclear that the repressive, authoritarian context of apartheid South Africa producedcollective memories shaped around large silences and lies, sometimes obstruct-ing the ability of individuals to place themselves in history. Ordinarily, memory,especially the oral memory of individual historical actors and witnesses, providesa way to excavate those silences.4 Examples will show that individuals activelyengage with collective and official memories where they can. But all memory,collective and individual, is by nature selective and changeable, evolving in aconstant transaction of acts of recovery and processes of suppression or forget-ting. In addition, the same authoritarian context that constructed collective mem-ories around silences and lies produced individual memories formed by the per-sonal experience of violence. Still, as this article will attempt to show, while thecollusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroythe ability of individuals to think historically, the individual historical actor canand does have the will to contest the “grand patterns and overall schemes”5 ofhistory. “Human detail”6 often appears insignificant, individual acts inconse-

HELENA POHLANDT-MCCORMICK24

3. Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York,1998), xi.

4. André Brink, “Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Post-Apartheid Narrative,” inNegotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee(Cape Town, 1998), 35. See also Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and theArt of Dialogue (Madison, 1997), viii.

5. Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” reprint-ed in American Historical Review 103 (1998), 1505.

6. John Demos, “In Search of Reasons for Historians to Read Novels . . .,” AHR Forum: Historiesand Historical Fictions, American Historical Review 103 (1998), 1528.

quential or futile. I argue that it is the soft aside, the individual, lone act of speak-ing or writing or doing, however small, that creates landmarks of memory,moments in the telling (past or present) in which the individual actively engagescollectively or publicly sanctioned memories and histories, acting into the spacesand contesting their hold. Individuals are certainly acted upon by the world thatsurrounds them, but they also interact with the world and it is these acts that arean expression of the historical will of individuals to “modify, shift, or evenremake, the public memory”7 . . . despite their wounds.

The stories of the dead, the disappeared, and the wounded presented here andrecovered through autopsy reports, testimony, written affidavits, and oral narra-tives all present evidence of individuals “talking back,” placing themselves inrelation to the larger collective narratives.

II. THE UPRISING

Memories of Soweto begin with police violence. For black South Africans the con-frontation with police officers who shot at students, immediately killing two of them,transformed a demonstration by school pupils into a violent and raging uprising.

The story is a familiar one. For several weeks, students in Soweto schools haddisputed a policy change that would have forced them to study certain non-lan-guage subjects such as mathematics through the medium of Afrikaans. UrbanAfricans considered Afrikaans a difficult language and few teachers were quali-fied to conduct classes in that medium. In addition, as the language of the police,administration, and the hated apartheid government, its imposition as the lan-guage of instruction in African township schools was entirely suspect. This pro-posed change represented the state’s assault on the language and culture of blackpeople, on their future, and on their power and ability to effect changes in poli-cies of immediate concern. In this case, the violence that was central to the prac-tices and ideology of the authoritarian apartheid state had become central also tothe lived experiences of historical actors during this time.

Class boycotts and other forms of low-key protests in higher primary and highschools had been subdued, discounted, or ignored.8 Finally, students from sever-al schools in Soweto had organized the protest march. Taken by surprise, thepolice hurriedly prepared to counter them. The two groups came to face eachother in Vilakazi Street, in front of Orlando West High School. It was 10:30 onthe morning of June 16, 1976. Six thousand pupils9 in school uniforms sang,shouted, and waved placards bearing slogans such as “Away with Afrikaans,”“Afrikaans is the language of the oppressors,” and “We are fed the crumbs of

VIOLENCE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY 25

7. Brink, “Stories of History,” 34.8. Republic of South Africa, House of Assembly, Debates of Parliament: June 17, 1976, C. W.

Eglin and R. M. Cadman (Cape Town, 1976), 9631-9642. 9. “The Commission accepts that shortly before the confrontation there were at least six thousand

people, but that more were joining their ranks continually.” P. M. Cillié, Report of the Commission ofInquiry into the Riots at Soweto and Elsewhere from the 16th of June 1976 to the 28th of February1977 (Pretoria, 1981), 112. Conflicting estimates put the number as high as 12,000 and as low as1,000, but many students had not yet reached the agreed-upon gathering place.

ignorance with Afrikaans as a poisonous spoon.” Their weapons were the stonesthat lay on the ground before them. Opposing them, forty-eight policemen underthe command of Colonel Kleingeld, “duty bound”10 to stop them and to restoreorder, carried revolvers, pistols, three automatic rifles, tear-gas grenades, and riotbatons. They had come in four police cars, three heavy armored vehicles, and twopatrol cars with police dogs. There is conflicting evidence on almost every inci-dent and aspect of what happened next, but within the hour two African childrenlay dead: seventeen-year-old Hastings Ndhlovu, and twelve-year-old HectorPieterson.11

The students “were filled with fury and frustration by the police violence thatended the march. This led to [further] acts of violence.”12 Widespread violenceraged on throughout the afternoon and the night. Liquor stores and West RandAdministration Board offices, buildings regarded as symbols of oppression, but notonly those, were burned down and looted, vehicles and several white people wereattacked, stoned, and burned. Four people died in the “riots” that morning. Duringthe afternoon and evening eleven more people died, four of them under eighteen.All died of bullet wounds, and the police were responsible for their deaths.

The initial phase of the uprising lasted only a few days, but the unrest andclashes with the police continued with sporadic outbursts and new deaths throughto the beginning of 1978. The violence did not remain confined to Soweto.Within two months after June 16, violence had swept into eighty African com-munities, townships, and rural Bantustans (homelands). Two months later still,the number stood at 160.13

As a result of the unrest in Soweto, 312 schools with 180,000 African pupilswere immediately closed. In Alexandra, the closing of fourteen schools affected6,000 pupils.14 Ninety-five black schools in Soweto, four in Alexandra, andtwelve in the Cape Peninsula were destroyed or damaged during the uprising.The uprising claimed at least 176 lives in the first two weeks. Estimates of thetotal number of deaths varied significantly, ranging from 70015 to 1,200.16 Onlytwo of the victims were white. Many very young children took part in the demon-strations. The South African Institute of Race Relations reported that eighty-nineof the dead in the West Rand Area were under twenty years old, twelve below ageeleven.17 Long lines of appalled and frightened parents trying to find their chil-dren formed in front of the Medico-Legal Laboratories and Morgue of the SouthAfrican Police. A boundary had been shamelessly crossed. The violence of


10. Ibid., 114.11. Spellings of Hector Pieterson’s name vary. I have chosen throughout, unless quoting another source,

to use the spelling, Pieterson, that appears on the headstone that marks his grave at Avalon Cemetery.12. Cillié, Report, 132.13. John Kane-Berman, Soweto: Black Revolt, White Reaction (Johannesburg, 1978), 5.14. Republic of South Africa, House of Assembly, Questions and Replies: 21 January to 24 June

1977 (Cape Town, 1977), 373-374.15. See Kane-Berman’s careful analysis of the numbers, Soweto, 27-28.16. Tebello Motapanyane, interview, January, 1977 in Sechaba: Official Organ of the African

National Congress South Africa, Volume 11, Second Quarter, 1977, 58.17. South African Institute of Race Relations, Survey 1976, 58 and 85.

“Soweto,” regardless of its agents, radiated across spatial and geographical, gen-erational, and racial boundaries. Soweto was everywhere.18

III. VIOLENCE AND SILENCE—PROCESSES OF COLLUSION

If the first casualties of the physical violence of the uprising were schoolchildren,then the first casualties of the discursive violence that followed were the storiesof what they had experienced and seen. They were almost immediately drawninto a discourse that sought to discredit and silence them, manipulating meaningfor ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and itsabsence—silences—further violated those who had experienced the events.

Even those writers who celebrated the cause of “the people” have tended torepresent protesting crowds as disembodied, sometimes idealized, abstractions.The African National Congress (ANC), too, selectively used aspects of the upris-ing to support its own cause, appropriated voices and images as its own, andgradually downplayed and therefore diminished the independent actions andthoughts of the young participants.19 Until 1976, this constituency of rebels hadbeen outside its grasp, and it had fallen to the various Black Consciousnessmovements to raise the consciousness of black South Africans. The studentsmobilized themselves and then accepted the responsibility that the events thrustupon them to continue to expand the battles for change, with varied success andat a great cost in death, imprisonment, banning, and exile. Since 1976, the strug-gle against apartheid has been politically successful. In this, the historical actorsof the Soweto uprising played a major part.

The ANC, all but silenced and in exile during the uprising, has emerged thevictor. Its own narratives of the uprising, brief and written from afar in the yearsfollowing 1976, have gradually been incorporated into a history of successful ifpainful heroic struggle. It has had to exclude the ambiguities inherent in theyouth movement and the challenges to its own authority posed by a powerful anddifferent ideology of resistance (Black Consciousness) in order to create a cohe-sive narrative that celebrates unity and its own ascendancy.

Violence may be subtle or blatant, but it was an integral part also of historicaland political thought in South Africa. It manifested itself in political and every-day language, in the way evidence was destroyed or concealed, and in the wayits material and discursive reality shaped the telling of stories, what could beremembered and articulated, and how those called to explanation and analysisapproached their topics.


18. Carol Hermer, The Diary of Maria Tholo (Johannesburg, 1980), 10. Diary entry August 13,1976.

19. The official narrative of resistance created by the ANC stood opposed to the official narrativeof revolt created by the apartheid government. The historical and political context in which they werecreated, the methods of their construction, as well as their immediate and long-term (historical) pur-pose are described in my Ph.D. dissertation, “I Saw a Nightmare . . .” Doing Violence to Memory: TheSoweto Uprising, June 16, 1976, University of Minnesota, 1999.

In this context, history writing itself could be a destructive force.20 Where itplayed handmaiden to the apartheid regime, it deliberately distorted the histori-cal record, inventing “mythological pasts in the service of the powers of dark-ness.”21 Such official histories of South Africa have never remained uncontestedlong, so there have existed critical, often radical, alternative versions. But theseoften proved themselves unmoving, leaving historical writings that, in the end,were stony monuments to the past—however sympathetic and carefullyresearched. These critical alternative versions were permitted to continue in partbecause of their (often inadvertent) complicity with the status quo, giving thosewho were critical of the government enough space to voice their opposition with-out resorting to political action. “Radical research,” which embraced left politi-cal ideologies that challenged the apartheid state and contributed significantly tothe demarginalization of African voices and experiences in South Africa, all toooften was not self-critical enough of the ways it served to replicate social rela-tions based on oppression and expropriation by race.22

An approach that seeks to penetrate the silences of historical memory in SouthAfrica must also look at the way language as well as concepts were made (unin-tentionally or willfully) accomplices in the process. Documents and historicalnarratives must be scrutinized for the silences they countenanced and the liesthey perpetuated. For example, it was all too easy for historians and politicalthinkers at the time to pick up uncritically the South African government’s por-trayal of the uprising as spontaneous, thus inadvertently, perhaps unthinkingly,characterizing Soweto as a turning point. Certainly, the vehemence of the studentrebellion, together with the speed with which it spread across the country, wasstriking and caught many off guard after years of relative quiescence of theAfrican population. But a treatment of Soweto as the turning point both in thehistory of apartheid and in the history of resistance needs to consider carefullythe many reasons why Soweto was considered a turning point, and how that con-cept in and of itself reflects a certain vantage point. The students of the BlackConsciousness movement had been struggling for years to emancipate their ownthoughts and to transform their philosophies into effective political action andinstitutions for change. This was certainly not news to the South African govern-ment, which had feared their potential power all along. The importance andimpact of the Black Consciousness movement, I argue, was underestimated;placing June 16 as a turning point inadvertently shifted analysis and understand-ing toward a chronology that began with that day, as if there had not been muchto prepare for it.


20. See Maurice Halbwachs, Memory and History, transl. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida YazdiDitter (New York, 1980); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory(Seattle, 1982); and the discussion by Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into CollectiveMemory,” American Historical Review 102 (1997), 1381.

21. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 116.22. I have borrowed these concepts from Windsor S. Leroke, “‘Koze Kube Nini?’ The Violence of

Representation and the Politics of Social Research in South Africa,” University of the WitwatersrandHistory Workshop, 13-15 July 1994, 11 and 14-21.

More than anything, historical memory is contested and manipulated by thosein power in repressive societies that seek to internalize oppression through ide-ology.23 The destruction of historical archives (such as the records of the magis-trates courts in which the daily indignities of apartheid laws were adjudicated)and the exclusion of materials from them,24 the one-sided teaching of history inclassrooms, official reports and government commissions designed to “explain”the state and its policies, the suppression of any information about political dis-sidents—all were violent attempts to change what is known and remembered ofSouth Africa’s past. The state could not change what had happened in Soweto in1976. But it compounded the violence that was directed at people physically byviolent attempts to hide the evidence thereof. In other words, the state tried tochange the meaning of events, and as a consequence it tried by violent means toalter the processes of historical memory.

Increasingly sensitive to the mounting criticism of the outside world, the SouthAfrican government felt compelled to explain why it had found it necessary toshoot and kill schoolchildren. To legitimize police action during the uprising, thestudent movement had to be disparaged. Government officials went about this intwo ways: first, they concealed the identities and the numbers of the dead, chal-lenged their ages, discarded their bodies, and belittled their actions. This practiceof deceit and concealment was in itself a violent assault on the dignity of its vic-tims and those who came in search of them. Second, through the Commission ofInquiry into the Riots at Soweto and Elsewhere from the 16th of June 1976 to the28th of February 1977, headed by Judge P. M. Cillié, the government created itsown interpretation of the uprising and the character of its participants and pub-lished it in an official Report. How the Commission itself dealt with allegationsof disappeared bodies, both in its hearings and in its Report, provides a strikingexample for my analysis of how this institution and its violent processes itselftried to alter historical memory.

Sophie Tema, a reporter, described the death of the first victim of the uprising:

We saw a boy who had an overall on, carrying another boy in his arms and a girl next tohim. She was crying, weeping, and they were coming towards us.25

In his testimony before the Cillié Commission, the man who fired the firstshots tried to deny any knowledge of his victim.26


23. See the multiple stories of the Soweto uprising in my Ph.D. dissertation, “I Saw a Nightmare,”where I have described how the ideologies and political agendas of those who were able to createauthoritative accounts have imposed meanings on the events of Soweto that reflected those agendas.

24. It is striking that among all the acquisitions of personal papers in the State Archive system,there are none of African people (the archival system of South Africa is now, as so much else, chang-ing fast, and undergoing a process of analysis and reinvention). In a remarkable and quite un-self-conscious exhibition of a change of heart and priorities, the State Archive in Pretoria displayed in theearly months of 1995 the original posters and pamphlets, as well as police photographs, from theSoweto uprising that had until then been secreted in the inaccessible stacks of the archive under theprotection of the South African Archives Act.

25. Testimony Sophie Tema. SAB K345, Volume 9, Part 21 (21 September 1976).26. Kleingeld also killed Hastings Ndlovu with a gunshot wound to the forehead. His father, Elliot

Ndlovu, remembered how the police had tried to convince him that the death had been an accident,

KLEINGELD: No, I don’t know who Hector Pieterson is, whether he was later usedfor the purpose that he was indeed used for. . . .

CHAIRMAN: Petersen was found there, he was carried from there to the clinic.KLEINGELD: No, I do not know Hector Pieterson, I do not know who he is, I cannot

say whether someone shot at him.27

Whatever it was that Colonel J. M. Kleingeld sought to conceal with hisambiguous statement, neither the identity of the child nor the fact of his deathremain in doubt given the evidence contained in the historical record provided bythe state’s official autopsy reports. They provide some of the most graphic andinescapable evidence of the physical violence that confronted the participants inthe uprising.

Hector Pietersen’s file meticulously tracks his body from BaragwanathHospital to the government mortuary, where it was identified as that of HectorPieterson by his mother, Dorothy Pieterson, on June 21, 1976. The district sur-geon, Dr. H. Bukofzer, took charge of the boy’s body and started the post-mortemexamination at 10 a.m. on June 22, 1976. He identified the body as that of a“bantu male child . . . Body No: 2492/76 . . . whose reputed age was 12 yrs.”28

Death, he wrote in the report, had occurred on June 16, 1976, caused by a “gun-shot wound of kidney, liver, lung & omentum.” He found a “1 cm bullet entrancewound on the right side of the back just below the right renal angle” and a “2 cmbullet exit wound on the left antero-lateral aspect of the neck.” The “Schedule ofObservations” described its path:

The bullet passed from right to left markedly upwards and forwards, enters the rightabdominal cavity where it transfixes and mutilates the right kidney, transfixes the rightlobe of the liver, transfixes diaphragm, transfixes the lower lobe of the left lung, transfix-es sibson fascia on the left, lacerates the left common carotid artery and emerges throughwound no. (2).29

The thoroughness with which the body of this first casualty of the uprising wastracked through the bureaucracy of death leaves no doubt as to his identity, norof the capacity for painstaking exactitude of procedure on the part of the respon-sible authorities. This must of course raise grave suspicions about the frequencywith which so many bodies disappeared temporarily or permanently, and sug-gests deliberate procedure rather than mistake or confusion.

Even this concrete evidence contained in post-mortem documents was, how-ever, violently manipulated to give it a different meaning to bend it to the dis-cursive purposes of the state. In front of the Cillié Commission, Bukofzer would


caused by a ricocheting bullet. He told the police that he thought they were not telling him the truth.Ndlovu told Kleingeld “I forgive you, but I will not forget. I told him, I even said [to] him if I canmeet you, I can kill you with my bare hands.” Elliot Ndlovu, “Two Decades . . . Still, June 16, June16,” film produced by Loli Repanis, directed by Khalo Carlo Matabane, for SABCTV, June 16, 1996.

27. SAB K345, Volume 140, File No. 2/3, Part 3: Commission Volume 15, testimony of JohannesMarthinus Kleingeld.

28. Report on a Medico-Legal Post-Mortem Examination, Post-mortem Serial No. 2492/76,Department of Health. SAB, K345, Volume 99, Part 4.

29. Ibid.

comment that this “does not look like a . . . ricochet shot. This is a direct . . . shot. . . [i]t was a very long and angled shot.” The curious angle of the bullet’s path—“[t]his was an entry of the back and exit on the other side, the neck, and this shotmust have been at a great angle in an upwards direction, going from the right tothe left side”—led Bukofzer to hypothesize that if Hector Pieterson had beenstanding up:

that shot came from below. If the person was lying down at the time, it could have comefrom the same plane or also slightly upwards. But this sort of shot is where I think the gunwas held well below to the level where the person was standing. . . . If he was lying down,it could have been really at any angle, but probably at the same level, similar level.30

Could Hector Pieterson have stumbled and fallen as he ran from the first vol-ley of gunfire? Advocate van Graan suggested another possibility:

. . . as to the position of the deceased. Was it perhaps possible that he was in a bendingposition when he was shot?

BUKOFZER: Yes, we must accept that as a possibility. Bending forward.31

It is what is not said here that is important. Van Graan suggested that the boyhad been bending over to pick up a stone to throw at the police, who had there-fore had good cause to shoot him. This suggestion echoed later attempts by theCillié Commission and other spokesmen of the government to try to prove thatthe police had only opened fire after the students had begun throwing stones, thusseriously threatening the lives of the policemen. Such attempts by the state tomanipulate or obfuscate the evidence, to cling to a high ground or to create con-fusions of causality, were deliberate maneuvers to obscure the inappropriatedeadly force with which the police fired on students, even if they were throwingstones. The facts of Hector Pieterson’s death, the exact circumstances, willalways remain inaccessible, no matter how numerous the records and recordingsof memory. Too many different political agendas converged to create publicmemories that are, ultimately, constructed around blind spots and silences.32

Memory can only partially excavate this silence, but what we do know is thatHector Pieterson was shot in the back and that he died.

The places of memory are multiple. Even when they are shadowed, manipu-lated, or silenced by the oppressive context of their creation—in this case in themortuaries and archives of violent state authorities—most sources carry withinthem historical evidence and meaning. In addition to the irrefutable factual evi-dence they contain, it is these harsh documents that at last provide a vocabularyso stark in its implications that it is equal to the task of rendering the violence ofSoweto. Sometimes the cool language of historical analysis seemed unequal tothe task of adequately describing or understanding the events for which evenordinary language lacks a vocabulary. We cannot recuperate the voices of thosewho were silenced by death. Often words do not seem adequate to describe the


30. Testimony Hans Bukofzer, principal district surgeon of Johannesburg. SAB K345, Volume 141,File Nr. 2/3, Part 5 (Commission Volume 26), 1182-1189.

31. Ibid.32. Brink, “Stories of History,” 37.

pain of Soweto. Moreover, words fail completely before the callousness withwhich those who committed the violence treated the memory of their victims.

The clinical language of post-mortems and inquests was scientific, precise,and remote. It nevertheless conveyed the terrible violence of this death, as of somany others. From this historical record some sense of the destruction done bythe police in the townships can be retrieved. Each of these victims became a sta-tistic, a short entry in the long lists of the dead that stood silent testimony butrevealed little of the people or of the story of their deaths. But the secrets can bewrested from the statistics by reading them against the historical record of autop-sy reports, police statements, and testimony. However harsh these medical juridi-cal descriptions are, they give each death a human face and substance. Theyretrieve the person from the silent historical record and lay bare the grim detailsof the circumstances of his or her death.

For example, according to the post-mortem report, Lele Ida Thobejane, forwhom there was no known address, died on June 18, 1976 in Alexandra town-ship from a “gunshot wound of chest” for which it could not be “establishedwhere and in what circumstances [it had been] inflicted.” A statement to thepolice by her husband revealed that she had been a housewife and was thirty-oneyears old. Mokonko Tobejane remembered having given her five Rands thatmorning so that she could buy milk for their two-month old twins.33

In some cases, even the most factual of information was exploited by thespokesmen of the government to prove the criminal and delinquent behavior ofthose whom it had killed. It was in the interest of the state to show that the par-ticipants in the uprising had abused alcohol following the large-scale looting anddestruction of beer halls and bottle stores in the townships. It made them seemmore violent and destructive and cast doubt on their courage and integrity. Thiswas the reason why blood tests were performed on all victims. In several casesthe post-mortem examination report made mention of white or green paint onbodies. Dr. Bukofzer revealed the importance of this finding before theCommission:

. . . If I am allowed to give hearsay evidence? . . . I mentioned this fact of the paint beingpresent on the body to I think it was Captain Engelbrecht, Soweto Police. He asked us torecord these findings very carefully as he considered this to be of great importance becausea number of the rioters who were shot, were busy firing buildings and they used paint, var-ious paints to—as an inflammatory material. They would use the paint to cause a big fire.This is what I was told and I realise this could be of importance in these findings.34

There are many such examples of attempts to exonerate the police. In the end,though, such strategies were futile in their attempt to diffuse blame. There wasno big difference between shooting a girl as an innocent bystander while aimingat someone else in a crowd—an accident, as the state would have had it—andshooting her on purpose. The recklessness and wanton disregard for the risk


33. Post-mortem report 2557/76, Inquest No. 1628/77 (20 June 1977). Statement, MokonkoThobejane, 2 August 1976. SAB, K345, Volume 99, Part 4.

34. Testimony Dr. Hans Bukofzer, 13 October 1977. SAB K345, Volume 141, File Nr. 2/3, Part 5,1189.

inherent in shooting directly into a crowd that, by definition, would have includ-ed children and innocent bystanders made this death as deliberate as if the policehad targeted her on purpose. This use of deadly force against students runningaway amounted to criminal culpability.

Such disregard on the part of government officials for the people they faced inthese confrontations took on even more sinister connotations in the more shad-owy space of police stations, prisons, hospitals, ambulances, mortuaries, andpolice wagons into which a person could disappear into silence or death. Thepolice consistently refused parents information about the whereabouts of theirchildren, and visits with them after they had been arrested. They detained chil-dren for long periods without charge or counsel. In these confused times, thesearch for missing children took parents along torturous paths between prisons,police stations, hospitals, and mortuaries, always half expecting that a childwould be found dead instead of merely detained. These searches were furtherdarkened by the possibility that a child had fled the country to escape the graspof the police.

The story of the search for Reginald Mshudulu provides another example ofthe ways in which the government sought to deny and conceal the collectivebiographies of the participants in the uprising. Albertina Mshudulu,35 a domesticworker, last saw her son, Reginald, on August 11, 1976 when he told her that hewas going to see the “burning offices.” The story of her search first for her sonand then, as the days passed without news, for his body, has pathos and dignity,but, in the end, rings with futility. As she went from hospital to hospital, to themorgue and the police stations in search of her son, she was given the runaroundby the very police and officials who had victimized him. Two months after he hadgone missing, she finally found him at the Salt River Morgue:

. . . he was the only one with his underpants on. His jacket had been taken away and waswith his pants. . . . In his jacket pocket was his reference book [an identity document] andalso a packet of cigarettes. . . . [H]e had been shot in the forehead on the 11th August.

Albertina Mshudulu never got a satisfactory answer to her questions about thecircumstances that led to his death, nor why it had taken so long to find him. Thishaunting story exemplifies the jarring consequences of bureaucratic deceit andthe appropriation of knowledge that was part of public memory. It was a storythat called the official history of Soweto into question. Such actions of the state,through its agents the police force, were endemic to South Africa underapartheid. That this was true was widely known, if not always acknowledged.These actions constituted a violent assault on the process of memory-making.Indeed, the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth andReconciliation Commission twenty years later, uncannily echoed AlbertinaMshudulu’s testimony:

One cannot fail to note, for instance, a pattern of callousness among police personnel whogave bewildered people a runaround, refusing to tell them of the fate of a missing loved


35. The following is excerpted from the affidavit by Albertina Mshudulu submitted to the Centrefor Intergroup Studies, University of Cape Town. SAB K345.

one. They were obliged to go from police station to police station, to hospitals and oftenfinally to a mortuary to know the truth. This was itself a form of torture. We have noted,too, a form of collusion between some elements in the judicial system, some members ofthe medical profession and the security police. They managed to subvert what little jus-tice there might have been. It is a collusion that has pointed to an abuse of power and alack of accountability.36

The words and actions of those who experienced these events themselves wereevidence of the impact of such disappearances and police efforts to conceal thenumbers of the dead. They were also an example of a will to connect individualexperience to the official public memory being constructed by the state and toforce, however unsuccessfully, history to listen. Albertina Mshudulu appearedbefore the Cillié Commission on November 25, 1976. “I was extremely upset,”Mshudulu said twice during her testimony and her words were full of disbelief atwhat she had been put through. But she did not let herself get confused by JudgeCillié’s questions:

MSHUDULU: I went to the mortuary at Salt River three times and on each occasion Iwas taken to the left wing side and on the last occasion only I was taken to the right wing.This is where I found my son. I asked why I had not been there before—I am sorry, I askedwhy I had not been shown there before.

CILLIÉ: Isn’t it they asked why you had not been there before? Did they ask you whyyou had not been there before?

MSHUDULU: No, I asked them why they did not show me the right hand wing sideon the first three occasions.

CILLIÉ: So you asked why they had not taken you there before?MSHUDULU: Yes.37

I have emphasized the relevant phrases in this excerpt to highlight JudgeCillié’s subtle rhetorical shifting of blame for the confusion to AlbertinaMshudulu. He implied that she had simply not been asking the right question andthat she had not gone to the right place. The turn of phrase “Isn’t it . . .,” peculiarto South African English, is a general tag-question inviting assent. Judge Cillié’suse of it in this context can be taken as quite deliberate since the phrase probablyderives from the Afrikaans “nie waar nie?” (isn’t that so?)38 of his mother tongue.The fact that Mshudulu herself asked to give evidence before the Commissionand her insistence on her version of what had happened amounted to a refusal tobe silenced and to submit to Cillié’s representation of the experience.

In the courtroom itself, the violence of the institutional setting and the cal-lousness of the investigators became apparent in the words of the state’s advo-cate. Dr. Percy Yutar, preoccupied both with the place of the shooting and arelentless—in this context, nit-picking—need for exactness, coldly evaded the


36. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, introduc-tion to the first interim report of the Commission in 1996, my emphasis.

37. Albertina Mshudulu, transcript of testimony. SAB K345, Volume 145, File 2/3, 3264. Myemphasis.

38. It is a substandard colloquialism, similar to the German “nicht wahr?” In this instance, it is usedvery similarly to the (American-)English legal question, “Is it not true that. . . .” Jean Branford withWilliam Branford, A Dictionary of South African English (Cape Town, 1991).

fact that Albertina Mshudulu was going to continue to get only “unsatisfactoryanswer[s]” in the search for her son and the story of his death. The Commissionaddressed neither the circumstances of the death, nor the cruel indifference of thesystem and its officials toward Mshudulu during her search. In the final Reportof the Commission, the circumstances surrounding Reginald Mshudulu’s deathwere described only briefly and without any further comment or mention of himor his mother’s search.39 The final entry about Reginald Mshudulu himself can befound in an Annexure to the Report which, in the sparse language of such lists,simply contains the name and details of each person who, “according to theinformation before the Commission,” died during and as a result of the rioting.

Mshudulu’s affidavit and her appearance before the Cillié Commission, on theface of it perhaps an exercise in futility, was an example of the sometimes per-sistent, often stubborn, almost always active engagement of an individual withthe historical context. Albertina Mshudulu may not have done this consciously,but her affidavit and her appearance before the Commission created a historicalrecord, however small, however much, in the end, a footnote to the official his-tory. Her resolute will to know and to speak will forever wrest the death ofReginald Mshudulu from the silence and from the oblivion to which the statesought to consign it, just as her search countered the state’s attempts at deceptionand concealment.

Her affidavit and her testimony represent the need of the individual to under-stand and make known the further violence inflicted by the indignities to whichshooting and riot victims were subjected. The momentary horror of the search forReginald masked the more terrible truth behind deaths such as these: the extremedeadliness of the encounters between the police and the children, and the subse-quent callousness with which the dead and their survivors were treated.

Undoubtedly, physical violence has left the most visible marks on the land-scape of history. The state circumscribed the lives of African people in the town-ships, confined them to oppressive living conditions, ruled them with a viciousand racist administration and police, denied them political participation, anddeprived them of economic opportunity and everyday stability and security. Thestories of the uprising itself illustrate both the violent acts with which the policeresponded to the mounting protests and the violent reaction their repressionunleashed. Unable adequately to counter the crushing force of police arms andmanpower, the students and others retaliated by destroying the physical struc-tures of apartheid—administrative buildings, schools, and institutions.

Violence was also done to the fabric of society, not only by apartheid and itsmigration and urbanization policies, but as a consequence of the divisions it creat-ed within families. The uprising itself cast a chilling shadow over relations betweenthe generations. Although many parents supported their children, many thoughtthey had failed the children in the past and had propelled them into a violent pres-ent where they were called upon to take up the tasks that were left undone by the


39. The events of August 11, 1976 are also described in Volume 2 of the Report of the Commissionof Inquiry, 141-143: see Appendix 1.

parents’ generation. “The children of Soweto turned their eyes to us and we failed,”Lennox Mlongi, opposition member of the Urban Bantu Council, commented.40

The inability of individual parents to protect children from police retribution,and the violence done to their dignity and authority by countless encounters withgovernment administrators and the police, left parents powerless and speechless.At times it must have seemed as if their children spoke a different language. Thiswas especially true for the issue of education, where the older generation’sinvestment and belief in education led to deep concern and disagreement over thetargets their children attacked. The threat of the police and fear of parental inter-ference made secrecy indispensable for the students, further disrupting the linksbetween parents and their children, and disrupting family ties that were alreadyunder severe strain. The most irrevocable disruption was of course executed bydeath. But secrecy also wrought its damage.

More than anything, violence—in all its manifestations—was inscribed in thememories of people. The bodies of those who did not die or disappear have sur-vived or recuperated from the physical violence of the uprising. Pain, grief, andanger became part of their memories and their individual histories. The experi-ence of physical and discursive violence has thus forged individual memoriesthat remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and unanswered questions; with col-lective memories that have left few spaces for ambiguity; and with official orpublic histories tarnished by their political agendas or by the very structures—and sources—that had produced them.

IV. INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The stories that individuals tell of the Soweto uprising are only in part about apolitical or social experience, about a place and a time. They are also about pride,anger, truth, secrets, deception, discovery, punishment, love, suffering, forgive-ness, and retribution—evidence of the “human nature”41 of historical experi-ences. This is not usually a space historians like to enter: it is one notoriously dif-ficult to negotiate in terms of reliability, “evidence,” and fact. From the consci-entious consideration of the details of human lives and historical evidence, andthe attentive listening to the expressions of human nature, however, a picture canemerge that portrays the rich texture of a historical event, the individual experi-ence of it, the structural features (trends, movements, patterns) that underpin it,and the changing individual and collective understandings of it.

Collective memory is located in the individual.42 Nombulelo Makhubu spokebefore the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 to discover what hadhappened to her son, Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu, the young man who lifted up thedying boy Hector Pieterson from the ground. The photograph of this moment has


40. Lennox Mlongi, opposition leader of the Urban Bantu Council. Minutes of proceedings, in locoinspection and fact finding mission by the Cillié Commission in Soweto, 7 September 1976. SAB,K345, File no. 2/1.

41. Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace,” 1516.42. Crane, “Writing the Individual,” 1381.

come to symbolize the uprising. Her appeal “to know how my child died andwhen did my child die”43 was a deliberate invocation of the past for the present.Her testimony also appealed directly to one of the oldest functions of history:telling the story. Her words created a direct link between her own memories ofthe uprising, centered around the loss of her son, and an image that had becomeso powerful in its symbolic weight that it threatened to eclipse the stories of thoseit represented—the children who stood at the epicenter of the historical moment.Her words were a reminder that this story has not yet ended, that it lives in thememories of those who participated or who were touched by these events, that itstill shapes the many meanings of the past for those who write or think or speakabout them in the present, that it has left many questions open, questions that willnot necessarily pass with the death of those who were there (for, as the mothersaid, “[t]he child is also wondering what happened to the father”44).

With her testimony, Makhubu tore a striking moment of resistance in the his-tory of South Africa from the past, and from the grasp of commemoration,memorialization, and symbolic representation and linked it to a present wherememories reside and stories about the uprising are told. Makhubu’s voice was thevoice of an individual thinking historically, appealing directly to every other per-son (professional historians and others) to think historically also, not to end theprocesses of history but to remember and to seek for some form of the truth.

“Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument,”45 Primo Leviwrote. People are mindful that their own stories are not safe with them, that theirmemories dim with time, and that, ultimately, they will be lost to the historiansand the children that come after them when they themselves die. The words “Ican’t quite remember,” are present many times in each interview, as is the invo-cation “. . . if you remember.” Sometimes memory is distorted, sometimesreplaced by lies. Memory drifts, fades, and is altered maliciously (with intent todeceive), sometimes defensively to protect against wounds that run too deep orknowledge that is too contradictory. The violence implicit in the destruction orconcealment of archives and records, the disappearance of bodies, the denial ofresponsibility, all disrupt—or worse, destroy—the ability of individuals to thinkhistorically, to place their individual memories in the context of history. This haseven more ominous implications if the individual experience of events of that his-tory was disturbing or physically or emotionally wounding. In such cases itbecomes impossible to discover the “shape and the ‘why’ of events,”46 and to sat-isfy the need of the individual to maintain continuity in the memory of his or herown life.47 Such a need grows, I would argue, with the intensity of the experi-


43. Nombulelo Elizabeth Makhubu, testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,Human Rights Violations, Submissions—Questions and Answers, Date: 30 April 1996, Case:GO/O133, Johannesburg, Day 3, my emphasis.

44. Ibid.45. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1989), 23.46. Stendhal, Vie d’Henri Brulard, quoted in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

(Chicago, 1992), 55.47. See Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York,

1996); John Kotre, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory (New York, 1995); andHalbwachs, The Collective Memory, 52.

ence, and is related to attempts outside the individual, by professional historiansor by the dominant narratives of the state or official resistance movements, toalter meaning, for good or bad.

The people who were part of the Soweto uprising, either as witnesses,bystanders, or participants, belonged to this period and were shaped by the “psy-chological and social atmosphere”48 of this time. Some of them were aware ofthe historical importance of what they had experienced, as evidenced by theneed, despite the fear of discovery, of someone like Patience Tshetlo to collectthe newspaper stories of the time. She told her story so that those who came afterher would see the story told again, through the photographs, through the articles,and possibly even through her own words, however inadequately prepared shemight have felt to tell the story herself:

[Why did you keep these?] I said maybe one of my grandchildren . . .. You know if Iknew how to write I would write the history, the story of this thing. I said, maybe mygrandchildren one day, they will look the history for this. Mmmh [yes]. [you should writesome of this down] . . . how can I write, I don’t know where to start. I could write . . ., ifI knew . . ., I could write. I can’t even know. [If you were to write, what would you writeabout?] I will write about this . . . riot of children. I will write the story and then put thepicture of the riot, . . . you know this is [the] hostel, the time they were fighting.49

Individually, people are not unaware of their limitations, and Patience’s words“how can I write, I don’t know where to start” can be heard as a perception bothof her own powerlessness and of the scope of the story: it is not just about find-ing the beginning, but about realizing that the “beginning” is so large, so broad,so encompassing, that it is difficult for one person to tell or to speak of. Thesewords also capture the distress of many whose need to think historically has notbeen met, or, worse, has been destroyed in the violence of the past. The wordsand stories of individuals are eloquent testimony, less to some objective histori-cal truth, than to the importance of considering history as a process in which eachindividual continuously tries to negotiate the place and meaning of his or hermemories in society and in time.

V. A CLOSE READING

If the historian is properly attuned, a close reading of oral history can reveal howmemory and imagination generate historical knowledge in an effort to makesense of the personal experience of historical events. Through oral narratives,individuals recounting their own historical experience can counter official histo-ry and contribute more nuanced memories to social history. Many things shapememory including the circumstances of the remembering, the time between theevent and the telling, and the age of the narrator both then and now. Another lesswell-understood influence on memory is the sociopolitical context of an experi-ence, in particular the way in which revisions of a nation’s historical memory


48. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 56.49. Patience Tshetlo, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Johannesburg, June 1995.

compel individuals to repress or alter their private memories. Oral narratives area process of the conscious and unconscious (re)construction of a story in theremembering of a historical event. They are shaped by the interaction of socialand political conditions, the relationship between historian and narrator, and theindividual experience of remembering. Narrators always actively shape and mea-sure their recollections. Two kinds of information go into a memory, the originalperception of the event, and the information supplied after the event. It is there-fore important how much time has passed, and what has happened both to pri-vate and collective memory in that time. With time, the two seem to becomeblended into a single memory that replaces what was originally present.50

Among the forces that most shaped the remembering at the time of thisresearch was the prolonged period of violence that marred the extended negotia-tion after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and before the elections of 1994.For several narrators, first interviewed in 1993, emerging hope and faith in thepossibilities of a changed future were tempered by this violence and by a grow-ing anxiety over the coming elections. They needed to make sense of a contra-diction: the compelling power and knowledge of the epochal change at hand, andthe daily experience of the violence that seemed inescapably part of it and root-ed in the past. For Patience Tshetlo, this violence reverberated in her memorieseven a year after the elections.

[How do people talk about June 16 now?] They don’t even talk now, they can’t . . . theydon’t even remember now. They can’t talk anymore. . . . No, no. It’s not like those years whenMr. Mandela was still in Robben Island. [Then people talked about it?] Yes, they were talk-ing there. They said the children tried to take over to Mandela. Others they were talking, theysaid children is better, but others they didn’t want [them], they didn’t want [this].51

For her, the violence in the townships had made it impossible to continue tothink of June 16 as the “beginning of freedom.” It had altered the content andshape of the memory:

[Why do you think that is?] I don’t know. They are talking this freedom now. And thekillings. You know, the people from Soweto, they have suffered too much. I think that iswhy they have forgotten the 16th. Before election last year, in the trains there were a lot ofpeople dead, they have been killed. I think that’s why they can’t even remember the June16th. [because of the violence . . .] Jaa, violence. Yes. Oooh, we are near the station. Weused to see the train when is coming. Seven o’clock train at the night. We’ll hear the criesthere, when we go the train is getting to platform. People they are thrown there in the rail-way line, stabbed, shot, I think that’s why they forgot the June 16th now. Because there isother things which is following . . . violence.52

At ANC headquarters in downtown Johannesburg, where some of my inter-views were conducted, pictures commemorating the life and death of Chris Hani


50. Lutz Niethammer and Luisa Passerini have a slightly different version of this: “the actual per-ception must have been far more complex before the observer settled on one particular perspective,and established it in the niche of his memory.” In Memory and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini,International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories (Oxford, 1992), I, 13 and 54.

51. Tshetlo, interview, 1995.52. Ibid.

hung on every wall. The metal siding that was to keep the sun out of his windowwas bent and buckled, still showing the damage from where a bomb, exploded todisrupt the process of transition to elections in 1994, had torn into the building.The shattered glass of the window had been repaired, but it was almost as ifshards of it still crunched underfoot, jangling the nerves of memory. In this way,political agendas and, even in 1995, the daily reality of apartheid and the strug-gle against it were still close to narrators’ thoughts as they told their stories.

How each person felt this violence, how they bore it over time, and above all,how it may have affected or changed their memories of these days, was highlyindividual, sometimes quite elusive. Lilli Mokganyetsi’s story was told mainly inthe language of public collective experience. However, the intensity of the inter-view and her way of shaping the narrative alerted me to the particular relevanceof its private meaning. Rather than discount the fractures in this otherwise coher-ent tale, I have tried to think of them as indicators of the way suffering wasremembered and influenced later memory. At the time I interviewed her, LilliMokganyetsi was a thirty-five-year-old teacher, born and raised in Soweto.53 Herstory was one of a political coming-of-age in the midst of the crisis in Soweto.Like so many young men and women, she was drawn into the vortex of politics,and learned, within the space of a few days in Soweto in 1976, what might oth-erwise have remained outside her experience.

Despite her initial fear of and ambivalence toward what she saw unfolding inher school, Lilli’s spirited retelling of the events of that morning reflected hermounting excitement. The students who started the march arrived at her schooland persuaded the students to leave their classes and join the march. An oldboyfriend grabbed her by the hand:

“Come Lilli, come, let’s go. Come, come here, let’s go.” You know, I just joined in [shelaughed] . . . we ran the streets of Soweto, getting into schools, collecting people. . . .Wewere . . . raising our fists, Black Power, Black Power, Black Power. . . . We travelled thewhole of Soweto, until . . . we reach Phefeni. Yes . . . Until we reached Phefeni. . . .54

Her voice grew softer as she told the following distressing part of her story:

And then, from there, a certain man . . . [she hesitated] . . . I wonder who was that man. . . who we throwed with stones, he was driving a car, of course, he was a white man. Wethrowed him with stones, because he was forcing to move within the mob, because evenother motorists, when they came, when they came our direction and find out there is amob, they would rather turn, or try to take another direction. So this man forced his waythrough us. And then, we tried to chase him, go back, go back, go back. He insisted, andhe suddenly took out the shotgun, and then when he was just about to fire one, or whetherhe fired one, I can’t say . . . . We started throwing stones, we started hitting him withstones, until he died [emphasized], and we took a dust bin, of course, they put him insidethat dust bin, and then . . . in the meantime . . . you could see flames blowing from some-where . . . [unclear] I tell you that it wasn’t from our own mob only, because Soweto is avery big township. . . . Smoke started billowing, and then the police of course, they now


53. Lilli Mokganyetsi, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 8December, 1993.

54. Ibid.

came in full force, shout at us, shout, shout, shout, shout, all those, all those . . . we triedto resist, you know, we were throwing them with stones of course, but at the ultimate endwe were fighting a losing battle.55

Here was the vivid personal experience of one of the first deadly clashes of theuprising. There are many other accounts of the stoning—most of them by wit-nesses sympathetic to the state. It was an episode which the state, in its officialretelling, tapped mercilessly to prove the “savagery” of the black youth in revolt:

Shortly after the shooting, Mr. J. H. B. Esterhuizen, a WRAB [West Rand BantuAdministration] official, drove along Pela Street in a motor vehicle belonging to theBoard. It is not known where he was going, nor is it clear whether the name of the Boardwas painted on the vehicle. Almost directly opposite the Phomolong clinic, the riotingscholars threw stones at the vehicle and one large stone shattered the windscreen. Someof these scholars were identified as pupils of the MIHS [Morris Isaacson High School].Ten or so youths dragged Mr. Esterhuizen from his car and assaulted him for about threeminutes. He was struck with stones and sticks, and left for dead on the ground. Three stu-dents fetched a rubbish bin from a house and emptied out hot ash onto him. This is whyit was found at the inquest that an attempt had been made to burn his body. A report in aJohannesburg morning newspaper on the 17th read that they had thrown the body into thebin and that some of them had said: “That is were he belongs.”56

Looked at side by side, the two accounts of the killing of Esterhuizen have anepisodic quality, similar in the violence they portray, different in the meaning theyattribute to that violence—on the face of it, two sides of the same coin. One is thelone voice of an individual remembering, the other speaks with the authority of thestate. Each “episode” carries within it traces of the collective narrative of which it isa part and which shaped its particular telling. These are narratives that follow dif-ferent paths, each shaped by the history that preceded it, and by the layers of per-sonal memory, collective memories, and “official” histories through which theyhave passed. On a personal level, it hardly matters that the collective history of resis-tance later legitimized violence against the state and its collaborators, even such ter-rifying violence as the necklacing of other Africans. These were collective meaningsthat might be expected to shape the story at the time of the telling. At the time of theevent, however, no such group or collective meaning existed, and the violence (orviolent responses to police violence) had not yet become commonplace. Nor wouldsomeone like Lilli, relatively protected from the excesses of police power and grow-ing up in an era of dampened protest and muted resistance, have had any experienceof such violence, either at the hands of others or on her own. The explosion of vio-lence on June 16, both of the police and of the schoolchildren, would have had apsychological impact at the time, which over time would influence its telling. Lillihad not spoken of her part in the stoning for a long time.

Lilli’s story hastened on. In fact it was the motion of the story that conveyedits emotion—and with that the importance of its meaning for her. Lilli’s storybegan with the quiet of the evening before, the ignorance, even forgetfulness, butquickly surged forward. There was a rhythm to her narration, together with the


55. Ibid.56. Report, 123-124.

repetition of the words stones, go back, and shout, that evoked the pounding feet,the clenched fists thrust into the air, and the thudding stones, as well as the gath-ering emotion.

There was more. On her way to another demonstration in downtownJohannesburg three months later she was confronted with the full ugliness ofpolice power. She was shot by police in the arm and leg, scars she still bears. Forall its detail, this is also a symbolic story, a metanarrative. Lilli’s story incorpo-rates all the elements of the collective story as well as some pieces of the officialhistory. Her words describe the children of the Soweto uprising as historicalagents in their own right. But they also suggest—through her use of such wordsas “mob” and the description of her initial fears—the possibility that the childrenwere, as the government had it, “passive pawns” whipped into a destructive fren-zy by “communist agitators.” Simultaneously, it is a story about the loss of inno-cence and the violation of the body and the spirit.

The two acts of violence frame the story in a way that shows they were linked.The police bullet violated Lilli’s body, just as the killing of the man on the streetviolated her innocence and that of a generation of children. This is the story of abrutal coming of age, of recognizing fear, and the gathering force of knowledge.It is a story that blurs the clear boundaries between the official and private mem-ory, between hero and victim. It is an epic and imaginative story, swelling withanger and with pride almost twenty years later, as if it just happened.

The death of Esterhuizen is a violent memory, a “landmark of memory,” cre-ated by the convergence of public and private experience.57 It features as promi-nently in the memory of individual participants as in the “official” apartheid ver-sions of the uprising. The question remains then, why Lilli’s story, which hadremained untold until our interview, emerged when it did? In what relationshipdid it stand to the judgment of others? Moreover, how did this private memoryintersect, overlap, or contradict collective memory?

Lilli’s story is not just exceptionally vivid and charged with emotional inten-sity. It is also a story that shows all the signs of the wounded individual, who, inthe remembering and the telling, surrenders the injury and anguish of the self thatwere part of the individual experience of the historical. The oppressive politicalcontext of apartheid produced repressed, conflicted, and dissonant memories. Infact, memories of experiences in repressive political contexts are oftenanguished. People needed to integrate such memories in order to create personalidentity, a “me that stays the same,”58 which provides a sense of stability overtime. Put differently, pieces of knowledge of a personal past are woven togetherin a complex mixture of life stories and personal myths, creating “biographies ofself that provide narrative continuity between past and future.”59 However, estab-lishing continuity in a person’s life often demands repressing or hiding certainambiguous experiences even if they were pivotal to the individual’s life. Lilli


57. Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, 13.58. Kotre, White Gloves, 150.59. Schacter, Searching for Memory, 93.

Mokganyetsi actively shaped the telling of her part in the Soweto uprising, notbecause of its lack of significance for her life, but because its details and her owndisquiet at its violence did not fit the public historical narrative which, in the tra-dition of heroic struggle against apartheid, had no place for such disquiet.

Collective public memory has little space for individual wounds to innocenceand body, or for the sadness that only briefly became visible in the gentleness ofLilli’s words: “I wonder who was that man.” Lilli’s story was told mostly in themode of collective political memory. The stoning broke that pattern. In the way sheset it up in the telling, against her own falling victim to police bullets, it becamestriking as the articulation of a private memory of the loss of both physical andpolitical innocence. It was a “landmark of memory” that revealed the need to estab-lish continuity between the present and the past and towards a responsible future.Lilli Mokganyetsi’s story conveys profound meanings that went beyond the imme-diate, beyond the apparent, beyond the chronological, beyond the coherent or theutterable. It reveals the interstices, the hidden places that memory seeks out to healthe wounds that history has inflicted on the individual. Lilli’s story demonstrates anessential, vigorous sense of responsibility towards the past, “the existence of anethical relationship with memory, and . . . a will and a need to elaborate the processof mourning.”60 In the end, this story’s power to unsettle proves its significance. Itsteered me toward a more complicated understanding of the powerful meanings ofthe stories of Soweto, toward recognizing the damage done by the silence to whichthese stories were relegated, and by the silences thrown up between those who werepart of Soweto and those who stood by, or let it happen, or who countenanced thosein their midst who committed these acts of violence (even as I did, as a seventeen-year-old high school student across town in Johannesburg).

Memory has some power to heal wounds, but the violence done to people’sconsciousness, to minds, to memory may be elusive. The violence done to bod-ies was not. All the while that Lilli carries her memories, she bears the physicalscars of the violence she experienced:

. . . the hole in the right, in the right arm, it’s this side [shows], and then this other side,on the left leg, I also was shot from behind here, and then, so now the bullet went throughthis way [shows] . . . so now, that is why the, the, the, the skirt was opened . . . at the backit wasn’t so much, just a tiny hole, and then in the front it was . . . just like that [indicateslarge space with her hands . . . long pause].61

In this way, the violence of the Soweto uprising and the violence of policeaction became inscribed on bodies, serving as a daily physical reminder of thingsthat the mind would much rather suppress or forget.

VI. CONCLUSION

What happened in Soweto did not just happen to those who were killed or dis-appeared or wounded there, or who waited outside the coroner’s office for news


60. Renate Siebert, “Don’t Forget: Fragments of a Negative Tradition,” in Memory andTotalitarianism, 166.

61. Mokganyetsi, interview, 1993.

of their children. In some sense what happened in Soweto happened to everyonein South Africa. It happened to those who lived in African communities outsideof Soweto, and who picked up the cause. It happened to those on the other sideof the racial divide. Physical freedom from state violence in the safe world ofwhite privilege was obtained at the expense of the physical violence done toblack South Africans. Their ability to articulate or act against oppression ampli-fied white passivity and silence.

The past in South Africa is mutually and multidirectionally constituted by indi-vidual and collective memory, critical and official history, narrator and historian.Nowhere was this more clear than in my research, in how my work needed to beconstructed around the relationships I entered into with the narrators of this his-tory. Lilli could tell me her story because she knew that Soweto was part of myexperience as a white South African, as it was part of hers as a black South Africanwho was there. More than anything else, this interview with Lilli Mokganyetsi tes-tified to the power of the dynamic interaction between two people—a dynamicthat in many productive interviews escapes the historian’s control.

The multiple truths of the memories I discovered are sometimes difficult, theirterrain treacherous, and the stories I heard were not always as simple as heroicmaster-narratives had wanted them to be. The stories did not always fit a coher-ent, nationalist narrative of heroism or sacrifice. Personal memory was oftenfragmented and painful. Recast as a nationalist narrative of liberation, it recon-figured and erased the fragmented character and the silences of embodied expe-riences of violence. The larger official or public narratives have failed to includethe humiliations and pain of the everyday experience of racism under apartheid,and the complex, often culpable relationship of whites to this history.

In South Africa, where the past is one of crushing violence towards the major-ity black population and the consequent culpability of the remainder, memory isshaped by that violence. The long-term experience of violence has left many witha sense of vulnerability, which is aggravated by a still very strong memory (oftenpersonal, but certainly collective) of the silences and lies, of people’s disappear-ances, and the way information was hidden by those so recently in power. Theneed to penetrate the silences, to know where somebody was killed, what exact-ly happened, to see a body and know the torturer, reflects a need to locate a per-son or an event in history, to find a place or a site for memory—a place or site inwhich memory can orient itself, create boundaries and spatial dimensions that areno longer so immense that they are frightening. This is also a need finally to placean individual memory, dislocated by violence, in relation to a historical context,where it is public and shareable, where its relationship to collective memory andmeaning can be negotiated.

Carleton College


I Saw a Nightmare . . .': Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976)

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Transcript of I Saw a Nightmare . . .': Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976)