Tsietsi Mashinini
The Tsietsi Mashinini artwork is a free standing wall with a podium designed to look like a text book with the cover title June 16 1976 and inscribed with the words Wait, this is our day!
The artwork is 2m x 3m with a podium that is 1.5m from the back wall.
The wall is covered with a montage of images on 10cm x 10cm ceramic tiles, facing the busy Mputhi Street.
The tiles include images of billowing teargas, outlining the route of the march that took place on June 16th, 1976 as well pictures of Mashinini and other students with clenched fists and protest posters, police shooting and numerous quotes in Afrikaans and Zulu.
Each tile is separated by blue grouting to signify the lines of a school exercise book.
The artwork was unveiled on June 16 by Tsietsi Mashinini’s wife as part of the June ’76 celebrations attendend by the President.
Tsietsi Mashinini led the 1976 Soweto student uprising. Charismatic and theatrical, he was a prefect and head of the debating team at Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto where his love of literature prompted a classmate to call him "Shakespeare's friend in Africa".
Mashinini was also president of the Methodist Youth Guild and a freelance writer for the Rand Daily Mail Extra. Yet he was far from a bookish dullard.
He played softball and karate and was a 70s stylista: he wore an Afro, bell-bottoms and peace signs – girls adored him and he later married a former Miss Liberia. He frequently dressed up to evade security police – a priest’s habit and woman’s clothing were among his most memorable disguises
On June 13 1976 at a meeting of hundreds of students at the Donaldson Orlando Community Centre, Mashinini suggested they have a mass demonstration to protest the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. He came up with a date: June 16, the day students were supposed to write exams.
To rouse the courage of anxious students, Mashinini quoted from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade: "O the wild charge they made!"
Mashinini was elected co-chairperson of the Action Committee. For the next two days the committee rallied support.
The final planning meeting was on the afternoon of June 15 where a strategy was worked out for the march: there was a set time for each school to join it before meeting up at Orlando Stadium. Mashinini left the students with a warning – stay disciplined, no violence – then went home to make banners - "Away with Afrikaaans", "Away with Bantu Education".
At school the next morning – June 16 - Mashinini whispered to his friend Murphy Morobe: "The main thing is not to provoke the police. We have to keep telling everyone to be disciplined, that we're marching to a particular place and then we'll disperse."
After prayers at the 8am school assembly, students unfurled their banners and posters. Mashinini raised the cry – “Amandla!” – and led them out of the gates.
The march wound towards Orlando Stadium, stopping to gather up more students – Mashinini rousing support - at schools along the way.
They reached Orlando West Junior Secondary where Mashinini was supposed to make a speech calling for solidarity and asking the government to drop the Afrikaans requirement.
Suddenly about 50 security police with guns and teargas faced the students. Mashinini and two others tried to approach them but when one policeman unleashed an Alsatian on the crowd, students threw stones at the dog. Then the police fired tear gas. The students aimed their stones at the police, and the shooting began.
Mashinini climbed on top of an upturned vehicle and urged the students to go home.
By 11am he was back at Morris Isaacson, telling students to stay at home for two days. But the revolt had started and could not be stopped. A series of events had been triggered that changed history.
Mashinini never slept at home again. On August 2 at Morris Isaacson High the hastily formed June 16 Action Committee became the Soweto Students Representative Council, with Mashinini as its first president.
Mashinini spent his days evading the security police and travelling Soweto with Winnie Mandela, a member of the Black Parents' Association, helping to bury the dead.
Secret meetings were held in Dube at activist Drake Koka's house, which they called The House of Exile after a Jimmy Cliff song.
A R500 reward was posted for information leading to Mashinini's arrest. But Mashinini who evaded capture by disguise - as a stylish woman, a workman and a priest. One time at a meeting at Morris Isaacson, surrounded by police who were letting the students out one by one in search of Mashinini, he sauntered out wearing girls' dungarees and a beret. The police looked him up and down, and let him pass.
Another time he was outside Moroka police station in Soweto with a group of friends where they brazenly stuck their fists out the window in the black power salute - a pose captured by a photographer Peter Magubane.
Mashinini told a journalist: "I don't say they can't get me....but there will be another Tsietsi, a day or even an hour later."
His life in danger, Mashinini fled South Africa in September. A Pretoria minister, Reverend Legotlo, offered to drive him across the border to Botswana but Mashinini was hesitant: "I don't want to leave the struggle. What good will I be in exile?" he said.
He went to say goodbye to his family who gathered in a circle while his father said a prayer for his safety.
After that night, is mother saw him once more in Botswana. His brother, Dee, saw him once in Nigeria, where he appeared shrunken, shabby, paranoid and incoherent. Much speculation exists around the cause of his death in Guinea, where he had been staying at the home of Miriam Makeba.
Mashinini arrived home in a coffin on August 4 1990. Though both the Azanian People's Organisation (Azapo) and the ANC wanted to control the funeral, Mashinini had never joined either organization or become involved in any of their support structures in exile. His funeral became a display of alternating affiliations. Each time someone from a different organisation spoke, the flag and the guard of honour changed.
The day before the funeral, just before the brothers could kill the cow to be slaughtered to feed the mourners, it escaped from the front of the Mashinini house - and was never caught. Some people believed this was a reflection of Tsietsi's name, which means "trouble, problems" in Sotho.
The Master of Ceremonies at the funeral spoke of graffiti on a wall near the Mashinini home: "He didn't do it for the ANC, he didn't do it for Azapo, he didn't do it for the individual, he did it for our liberation."
On June 16 1995 Mashinini's tombstone was unveiled at Avalon Cemetary. Etched in black granite were the words "Black Power".
Mashinini's mother Nomkhitha, who was also detained for 197 days, testified at the TRC in Soweto in July 1996 that informers would tell the police they had seen Mashinini at the house.
Then the police "would come, open wardrobes, they wanted to find Tsietsi under the beds, under ballpoints, under a watch, under everything, searching for Tsietsi and Tsietsi would never be there because he would never come, he would never come …”
Inscription
At 8am on June 16 1976 Tsietsi Mashinini interrupted the school assembly to lead the first group of students out of the gates and on the march that started the Soweto uprising. They were protesting against the use of Afrikaans in schools. A reward was posted for his capture and one afternoon security police checked every student leaving the grounds. Mashinini, who was a prefect at Morris Isaacson, escaped detection by dressing up as a girl. After the march he never slept at home again and fled the country two months later.
Submitted pictures
At Flickr
