Tomorrow is Youth Day in South Africa, a day that recalls forever the determination and bravery of the students who took it upon themselves to confront the apartheid government. On the 16th of June 1976, thousands of black students walked from their schools to Orlando Stadium for a rally to protest against having to study in Afrikaans at school (for many a second or third language). What happened on 16 June will never be forgotten.
Live ammunition was fired into the crowd and 23 people were killed. The photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson (only 12 years old) being carried by 18 year old Mbuyisa Makhubo, with Hector's sister Antoinette running alongside them, is a frozen moment capturing the horror of that day. Hector was the second child to be killed that day; the first child to die was 15 year old Hastings Ndlovu, but there was no photographer present to mark the moment of his death, or the deaths of many other children. Instead, that single stark image has made Hector Pieterson a figurehead for all those who were killed or injured while they tried to take a peaceful stand against apartheid and totalitarian rule.
Much more recently, on Sunday, 11 March 2007, people converged on the Zimbabwe Grounds Stadium in Highfields, Harare, Zimbabwe, to attend a peaceful rally called by church leaders and human rights activists working within the Save Zimbabwe Campaign. They were coming together to protest against the oppression of Robert Mugabe government. Gift Tandare, the youth chairperson of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) local structure in a Harare suburb, was among them. Just as the South African police responded to the 1976 rally with violence, so did the Zimbabwe police respond with violence: live ammunition was used against the peaceful crowd.
Gift, who had come to attend a peaceful rally for change, was shot in the chest. He expected to be standing alongside other like-minded activists, praying for freedom and peace for our country, instead, he died on the side of a road. It didn’t end there: his friends tell how the police refused to allow them to call him an ambulance. Two days after his death, police shot at mourners visiting his family’s home. Then on learning that Gift’s family planned to bury him in Harare, Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) operatives stole his body from a mortuary, and forced the family to bury him in Mt Darwin instead. Gift died, but his family were terrorised by Mugabe's thugs long afterwards: they were threatened with torture if they failed to disclose the names of the NCA activists who attended his funeral in Mt Darwin.
We don't have an iconic image, like the one of Hector Pieterson, which captures Gift's last living moments. Robert Mugabe understands the power behind a picture and as a result press freedom in Zimbabwe is deliberately stifled. It is controlled so rigorously that journalists are literally risking their lives to capture atrocities on film. One such person was the cameraman Edward Chikombo.
Edward Chikombe was abducted a short while after the thwarted Save Zimbabwe Campaign rally by four armed men believed to be part of Mugabe's CIO. His friends fought to prevent him being carried away, but the abductors beat them back with rifle butts in their faces. On the 31 March Edward’s body was found in a field: he had been badly tortured and beaten to death. Why? The CIO believed Edward to be one of the cameramen who shot footage of Morgan Tsvangirai emerging from the courthouse showing evidence of his torture injuries while in police custody. Just as the image of Hector said a lot about apartheid, so those images said a lot about the kind of government under Robert Mugabe. The government believed Edward was responsible, so without trial or proof or just cause, they killed him. Mugabe's spokesperson, George Charamba, described Edward in this way and his comment clearly reveals the government’s attitude towards journalists doing their job: "if he was doing media work he was doing so as a spy using media equipment which may explain his case".
So when you see that famous image of Hector Pieterson on the 16 June, as you surely will, we ask you to think of Gift Tandare, because just like Hector and the youth who walked to the rally at Orlando Stadium on 16 June 1976, Gift was also a young man trying to make a stand against oppression. Just like Hector, it cost him his life. And also like Hector, we will never forget how brave he was and what he was trying to do for all of us. We know that we will be free one day, and that Gift, like Hector, played an integral role in helping us get there.
There are many more young people just like Gift, living in Zimbabwe and fighting for justice and peaceful change. Their fight brings them face to face with a ruthless government that thinks nothing of killing and torturing civilians so that they can cling to power. We ask South Africans, on Youth Day, to think of those young people and to ask themselves what role South Africans can play in helping their neighbours achieve a future free of tyranny and filled with hope.
We ask you to look at that picture of Hector, and think about the power it has to tell the truth, and to think of journalists like Edward Chikombe, who put their lives at risk trying to capture the truth so that people around the world - people like you - will truly know the extent of Mugabe's oppression of the Zimbabwean people.
It is a terrible shame that Hector Pieterson didn't live to see 1994, the year when he and many others saw their actions translate into freedom: finally, at last, all South Africans could queue and vote regardless of race, colour or creed.
In 1994, Zimbabweans shared in South Africa's joy. In 1994, we ourselves stood with a few years between us and the horror of the Gukurahundi in the 1980s, a time when Mugabe unleashed his army on Matabeleland and killed 20,000 civilians. We were beginning to hope that like yours, our future might also be getting better, and that those days of horror were behind us.
But we didn't know, as we revelled in the glow from your Rainbow Nation, that we were in the eye of the storm, and that it would be only six short years before Mugabe lost his referendum in 2000, and started his second war against Zimbabwean civilians. He has told those carrying out the atrocities on his behalf: "We are at war again . . . If one of you is asked why you are killing, you say, it is not us, it is the President".
It is impossible for Zimbabweans to listen to stories of the struggles that South Africans went through in their fight against apartheid, and not think of our own struggle for freedom today.
When you celebrate your Youth Day today, we will be thinking about our youth in Zimbabwe. Young people who are forced to join militia camps where their bright minds are dulled with free alcohol, drugs, rape and violence in a sophisticated brainwashing procedure – all part of Mugabe's efforts to create himself a Nazi Youth. We think about our young people who want to avoid the horrors of Mugabe's militia camps, desperate for employment and a future, and who see your country as their only hope. But this is a choice fraught with its own dangers, one that involves a life-threatening swim across the Limpopo and the risk of incarceration in a South African holding camp.
If Hector Pieterson had survived, he would be in his early forties now. We don't know what kind of a man he would have become because his life and his future were stolen by an oppressor's bullet. But we hope he would have continued to stand against oppression, and we hope that all those who survived to enjoy freedom while he and others made the ultimate sacrifice will do so too. Apartheid was never just a South African problem; it was an African problem, a human problem. And the world stood by the oppressed. Robert Mugabe's tyranny is not a Zimbabwean problem alone, it is an African problem, one scarring our continent and giving it a bad name.
South Africans know very well that there is no future for youth in a country ruled by oppression and tyranny, through violence and terror. You don't need us to show you pictures of our dead and dying to know our story, or to hear our stories of young people trying to find a future, trying to find their way to a safe and happy life, because you've lived through it yourselves. Just look to your history and remind yourselves where you've been and how far you've come.
Then reach out, and stand with us today.
Links:
[1] http://www.sokwanele.com/system/files/images/ecard_youthday_320w.gif