Tsietsi occasionally stopped alongside the marchers to deliver reports of police movements. As they drew closer to Orlando West, he halted more frequently to address the youths and plead for calm. ‘Please be disciplined,’ Tsietsi urged them. ‘Do not provoke the police. Do not throw stones. If the police confront you, show them the peace sign.’ At other times, though, Tsietsi seemed as caught up in the moment as the most excited of the youngsters. Duma Ndlovu, the journalist, came upon him leading a chant. ‘Who do you see when you see Tsietsi?’ he yelled at the crowd.
‘We see a hero when we see Tsietsi!’ the students roared.
‘Who do you see when you see [Prime Minister John] Vorster?’
‘We see a dog when we see Vorster!’
By the time the marchers reached Orlando West Junior Secondary later in the morning, they numbered in the thousands. Seth Mazibuko, the school’s head prefect and vice-chairman of the Action Committee, awaited them in the schoolyard on a hill above the road. He and his fellow students had gathered at assembly earlier in the morning; instead of the usual programme, they had sung ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (God Bless Africa), the lovely, lilting hymn that was a national anthem throughout the continent. Then they shut the school gates. Seth walked down the hill to confer with Tsietsi on the next move. The Orlando West students were supposed to leave the school to join the demonstration; Tsietsi would then make a speech, pledging solidarity with the students in their boycott and calling on the government to scrap the Afrikaans requirement.
Suddenly, police vans and cars appeared. Having failed in their earlier attempts to quell the march, the security officials now meant to finish with it completely. About fifty policemen, some armed with guns, others with tear gas canisters, faced the students. Many of the men held the leads of German shepherd dogs. The youths continued to sing, wave their placards, flash peace signs at the policemen. The tension was palpable. ‘My God, the police are going to do a Sharpeville on us,’ gasped a friend standing next to Murphy Morobe. Tsietsi, Seth and another activist tried to approach the security officers to speak with them. At that moment, the officers let loose one of the snarling Alsatians. The dog tore into the crowd. Terrified, the youngsters picked up stones and threw them at the animal. The police fired tear gas canisters; now the students turned their stones on the security men.
Then the police began shooting.
Screaming youngsters fled in every direction. Some stopped to throw stones at the police who answered with seemingly indiscriminate volleys aimed into the crowd. Murphy heard bullets whizzing by his head. Out of the pandemonium, a youth emerged carrying the lifeless body of twelve-year-old Zolile Hector Pieterson. Zolile’s sister ran beside him, her face etched in grief, her hands upraised in horror. Samuel Nzima, a black photographer, captured the tableau on film. The picture would be seen around the world and come to symbolize the brutality of the South African regime.
Fearing that the march was turning into a massacre, Tsietsi clambered on top of an old bulldozer on the roadside and tried to get the youngsters to disperse. People have been shot, he shouted hoarsely. Let us not give the government any more victims. The best thing to do is go home and regroup. The struggle has only just begun.
The youths, outraged by the police actions, responded to Tsietsi’s exhortations by exploding in a rampage as they retreated. Using stolen petrol and paraffin, they began setting fire to anything in their path that smacked of government authority. The administrative offices of the West Rand Administration Board (WRAB), post offices, government-owned beer halls and bottle stores – all were attacked. The furious students overturned vehicles from the hated WRAB and set them on fire. Two WRAB employees – a white official and a black policeman – were assaulted and killed.
Amid the chaos, Seth ran to the house of Winnie Mandela, the wife of the jailed ANC leader, Nelson Mandela. She was pulling out of her driveway in her Volkswagen and stopped to open the door for Seth. As they drove off, he looked around for Tsietsi, but in vain. Murphy also lost Tsietsi in the maelstrom. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to get to Baragwanath Hospital in a journalist’s car to attend the wounded. Navigating his way back to Orlando West, Murphy saw no sign of his friend – only a township engulfed in flames.
Mpho, further down the line of demonstrators, attempted to run in the direction of home at the first sound of gunfire: jumping fences, dodging the police cars that suddenly were on every corner, ducking at the sound of their bullets. He sought refuge for a while in a house that was crammed with frightened students. The owner kept watch through a crack in a window curtain. When the street seemed clear of danger, Mpho dashed out and resumed hurdling fences through back-yards. He wanted to avoid the main roads, which the police were now patrolling in great numbers.
In Dube, Mpho jogged past an overturned dairy truck lying in the middle of the street; there was milk, cheese and fruit juice all over the road. He stopped long enough to heave a stone through the vehicle’s windscreen. Rarely in his sixteen years had Mpho experienced anything so satisfying: the truck clearly came from a white-owned establishment in Johannesburg. This was his chance, finally, to strike back at white power.
Dee, meanwhile, had become immobilized when he heard the shots. In the middle of the stampede he stayed rooted to the ground. Everywhere Dee looked, children were screaming, running, falling down, bleeding. He watched as one boy with a shattered leg tried to flee. Holding his injured limb, the youngster hobbled a few steps, collapsed in the dirt, pulled himself upright, staggered a bit, toppled again. Dee saw all this through a kind of slow-motion haze.
The tear gas pulled him out of his trance. Dee began to run, along with the other panic-stricken children, desperate to escape the choking chemicals. He found himself squeezing into a latrine in someone’s back-yard. Six other youngsters were already hiding in the tiny, corrugated-iron hut. Dee crouched in the darkness, listening to the gunfire; he could not get the picture of bleeding bodies being loaded into cars out of his head. His fellow fugitives tried to remain silent as the police swarmed about the area. But the tear gas made them cough; one youth vomited. After about ten minutes, unable to withstand the fear and the stench, the youths burst out of the enclosure.
Two women in a nearby house motioned them indoors. They brought the children a bucket of water to wash the gas from their eyes. And they gave them glasses of milk to clear their throats and settle their stomachs. The students cowered in the house. Dee was terrified; he had no idea what to do. His only thought was to try to get back to his home. He felt he would be safer in his own neighbourhood, on his own turf.
He left the women’s house after about an hour and set off towards the Jabavu section of Soweto and home. Like Mpho, he took a long, circuitous route to avoid the police: running and hiding in backyards, avoiding open fields, crossing to areas with large concentrations of houses so he could disappear among them. Dee traversed the township in a state of disbelief. Everywhere he saw municipal offices on fire; shops owned by Chinese merchants – much hated by the blacks – burning; children, giddy with their new-found power, demanding bread, drinks, water from scared storeowners. To Dee’s mind, the world had turned upside-down.
Back at Molaetsa Primary, Tshepiso began hearing helicopters hovering overhead. The teacher tried to keep him and his classmates in their seats, but to no avail; the curious children bolted outside. There, in the distance, they saw the burning buildings and vehicles. Tshepiso decided something was terribly wrong. He set off to find his younger brothers, China (as Sechaba was called) and Dichaba, both of whom attended Molaetsa. Dismayed at discovering their rooms empty, Tshepiso raced from class to class; by the time he found them, the helicopters had begun dropping canisters of tear gas nearby. Teachers were screaming, children crying; the yard was in chaos. Tshepiso grabbed his brothers’ hands and fled the school.
At first he took the usual route home, but large numbers of youths passed him going in the opposite direction.
