As they stepped down from the train, they trod on shattered glass and heard the news. Your brother has been shot and killed, Makhubo was told.
When South African police opened fire on marching schoolchildren in the township of Soweto on 16 June 1976, Makhubo’s neighbors had seen her older brother, 18-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubo, drenched in blood and staggering to a clinic, carrying a limp boy in his arms. They assumed he had been gravely hurt.
In fact, it was the 12-year-old boy Mbuyisa had scooped up in the midst of the chaos who lost his life that day. His name was Hector Pieterson. A photograph of the two taken by a local journalist was printed first by a local newspaper, and then around the world.
It would go on to have a huge impact, prompting global outrage at the police’s brutality, becoming an iconic image of the struggle against a hated racist system and prompting a new wave of protest that would eventually lead to the end of apartheid.
Today, South Africa commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, as that day is now known. No one knows exactly how many people died – estimates range from 150 to 700 during the months of subsequent violence.
But the anniversary – like the famous photograph – will provoke a variety of reactions, not all of them easily reconciled.
“The uprising means different things for different people,” says Khwezi Gule, chief curator of the Hector Pieterson museum and memorial in Soweto. “There are different generations and varying constituencies. Even those who were there in 1976 were affected differently: parents, students, leaders, people just caught in the crossfire.”
Much attention has been focused on Pieterson and the screaming girl in the picture, his younger sister Antoinette. Both were pupils at local schools and were marching to protest against the introduction of compulsory tuition in Afrikaans, seen as just one more humiliation for students crammed into deliberately overcrowded, under-resourced schools designed to deny, rather than provide, education to South Africa’s black majority.
There were deeper factors too. A new generation had lost faith in its political leaders, who were mostly in jail or exile, and many were contemptuous of parents who they thought had accepted apartheid’s humiliating restrictions.
Pieterson, although not particularly politically aware, had joined his school friends to march through the dirt streets of the sprawling township to a local stadium. Police blocked their way. A standoff followed. Stones began to fly. Teargas filled the air. Then the shooting started.
“There was confusion. I saw people hiding themselves and then I hid myself too. I was afraid because I didn’t know where Hector had gone to ... then I moved forward and I … saw Hector’s shoe,” Antoinette remembered 15 years later.
It was then that Mbuyisa Makhubo picked up the boy and began to run. There was little point – he was dead before he reached the nearest hospital.
But if the Pieterson family were shattered by the events that day, the Makhubo family were soon to suffer too for Umbiswa’s impulsive act of kindness.
The family had already paid a heavy price for their involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle. Key African National Congress (ANC) leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu had been family friends before being jailed, and the Makhubos were well known to authorities.
Mbuyisa, his other two brothers and sister Ntsiki were frequent visitors at Mandela’s Soweto home where Winnie, his second wife, sometimes cooked for them. “She also helped me register for college,” Ntsiki said. “We used to go over and eat there: spinach and pap [maize flour mash], or sometimes grilled meat.”
Mbuyisa’s father had joined the Umkhonto we Sizwe organization (MK), which waged a campaign of sabotage and violence within South Africa in the early 1960s. Forced to flee to avoid prison, he lived in ANC camps in neighboring countries before dying in 1973 in Kenya.
Within days of the Soweto uprising of 16 June, it became clear that Mbuyisa would follow his father into uncertain exile.
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