Salient. Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Volume 39, Number 25. October 4, 1976

[Introduction]

Soweto boils over leaving over 170 dead and over 1,000 injured. Apparently a demonstration against Bantu education, in fact it is a blind reaction against the whole [ unclear: Bantustan] policy by the urban South Africans condemned to live in ghettoes on the fringes of white society. Hugh Lewin analyses the terrible events.

At the height of the troubles in Soweto last month, a black Johannesburg journalist was asked what was happening. "The kids," he said. "Have taken over." He sounded surprised—and a little alarmed.

He was surprised, he said, not that the riots were taking place but that the protesting school children were so untied and so clearly politicised. "It wasn't, he added, "like this at Sharpeville."

Everybody - as the troubles spread from Soweto to Alexandra, then to Mabopane and the rest thought immediately of Sharpeville. Comparisons were inevitable with the events of 1960 when jittery police shot dead 69 of a crowd of pass-law protesters outside the South Rand township of Sharpville, itself identical to many of the complexes which today make up 'Soweto' the South Western Townships of Johannesburg.

There was even, this time, a certain sick sense of confirmation at the news of the spreading violence and the mounting death-toll. Ever since Sharpeville, the world has been waiting for its sequel and what was surprising about Soweto was not so much that the riots began on June 16, 1976, in the way they did, but that Sharpeville's sequel had taken so long in coming.