As part of Black History Month, Rachel Nkumanda came to Thamesmead Youth Centre to talk to the young people about life as a black woman in South Africa under apartheid. Apartheid was the racial segregation imposed by the South African government between 1948 and 1994. A team of Headliners journalists were there to speak to her and find out the role children and young people played in the 1976 revolution.
How long have you been living here in England?
29 years. I moved in 1978. Steve Biko [South African anti-apartheid activist] was killed in 1977 and I was out of there. It was very frightening at times.
Does everybody go to school in South Africa no matter what their status?
At the moment, everyone is going to school but they didn’t before. There were children who didn’t go to school because their parents couldn’t afford it. The situation today in South Africa is that you will find black kids who play with white kids, and schools where they all go together.
How did segregation work in South Africa?
Well, you would see signs outside shops that would say ‘Europeans Only’ or you might have entrances to places that said ‘Blacks Only’. It’s like there were areas that were only for white people. If you were black you couldn’t go into this shop or that shop, it was that bad. But everything started to change in 1976.
What was the role of young people in the 1976 revolution?
Towards the end of the revolution in South Africa it was the children who were at the forefront of it. In 1976 they went on a march because the schools were going to start teaching in Afrikaans. Afrikaans is the Dutch language, but it was only spoken by four million South Africans, and all the black children spoke English so they couldn’t be taught in another language.
When they tried to enforce this law the kids thought ‘this is it’, and they went out in the streets. There were thousands of kids coming and protesting. Soon the police arrived and they opened fire. There is a little boy called Hector Pieterson who was shot and killed by the police. There is a photograph of another boy carrying his body and it became one of the famous photographs of the revolution.
Were you there?
Yes I was living in South Africa at the time. My younger sisters came to me and said “Come come come! Let’s go down the street, come and see, come and see!” So we ran down the street and when we got there I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were loads of kids, all singing political songs and moving towards the soldiers and the tanks. These kids were not going to stop. I was watching with my hands over my eyes when I heard the guns go off and I thought “Oh my God, they’ve killed them!” But they hadn’t. The soldiers had fired at the ground.
A lot of children did die, though. If you were a kid you had to be very careful because the soldiers or the police would grab any kid walking around and take them away and interrogate them.
At the end of the day the revolution in South Africa changed because of what the kids did. When the world saw the picture of Hector Pieterson and the news footage many people were outraged. People stopped supporting South Africa, then stuff like the Anti-Apartheid movement moved things very fast towards the end of segregation in 1994.
How do you feel about the situation in South Africa today?
There are a lot of good things that are happening, particularly for the youth. There are many youth groups that are run by youths themselves. Some run different programmes, some of them are for kids who haven’t got education and some are based in schools and they help disadvantaged kids.
Is it getting better quickly or slowly?
I think in all fairness, in 10 years South Africa has done very well. You have to remember that South Africa was the last African country to get freedom, but when South Africans want to do things they are very focused.
Why do you think that in South Africa the kids came together to fight for something positive, but in this country a lot of the youth are hating on each other?
Well, you have to remember that whatever you don’t do today is going to affect you. You also have to remember that whatever advantages you have today are due to sacrifices that people made before you. What happens is that people make sacrifices and then the next generation gets things nice.
Then because that generation are not connected to those sacrifices, they make a mess of things until they go right back down to the bottom. Then somebody else has to make sacrifices again to sort things out for the next generation, and that’s how it goes.
At the end of the day everybody knows what is wrong or right. It’s inside you. So it’s up to you to make a decision about what you want your future to be like.
About this article
Interview by Ernest Baker-Hammond 14, Raymond Ukwenya, 15, Faye Wheatley, 16, and Lizzie Wheatley, 17. Thanks to the young people at Thamesmead Youth Centre.
Photo courtesy of Rachel Logan
