decided to turn around and follow them. Now Tshepiso was running away from his house, China on one side, Dichaba on the other. He gripped his brothers’ hands so tightly he virtually dragged them along the street. The walk to their house usually took about twenty minutes, but on that day they wouldn’t arrive for three hours. Each route Tshepiso chose seemed to lead him into crowds of people trying to go the other way, away from the police and guns and tear gas. He kept having to double back, retrace his steps. All Tshepiso wanted was to go home; he and his brothers would be safe there.
As people passed them, some shouted at the three boys to discard their school uniforms. The police were shooting at anyone who even vaguely resembled a student. The afternoon had warmed slightly, so Tshepiso made China and Dichaba stop briefly to shed their jerseys and white shirts and stuff them into their school bags. Then they resumed their race homeward.
When the three youngsters reached their neighbourhood, near Morris Issacson High School, it resembled a war zone. Police cars careened through the streets, shooting at youngsters. Military helicopters were dropping canisters of tear gas. Tshepiso mistook them for explosives; he thought the army was bombing the township. Terrified, he huddled with his brothers behind some boulders on the ‘mountain’, the sloping field opposite their house. ‘Now when I tell you to go,’ Tshepiso whispered to them, ‘you must make a dash for it.’ He waited until the area seemed clear of police, then leaped up and ran across the road, China and Dichaba in tow. Black smoke curled upwards from Morris Issacson.
Dee returned soon after Tshepiso. He felt safer inside the house, but was too excited to remain for long. Dee told Tshepiso he was going to the ‘mountain’; from the top, he had a sweeping view down to the end of the road. And the boulders afforded him protection. Dee found several other children already there, sheltering behind the massive rocks. They took turns popping out from behind the boulders, shaking their fists at the policemen on the street, then jumping back to safety. Not everyone was fast enough: Dee helped three boys to extract birdshot from their limbs with a knife and paraffin.
As night fell, Dee grew cold on the ‘mountain’. He and his friends regrouped on a tarred road that ran behind his house. From there, outlined against the sky in the waning half-light, Dee could see the smouldering remains of the Chinese shops. He knew he should return home, but was reluctant to part with the day. He wanted the excitement and the extraordinary feeling of power to continue indefinitely. Dee watched convoys of police vans snaking towards other parts of the township. Finally, shivering and hungry, he bade his fellow combatants farewell and headed for his house.
Nomkhitha was at work in Johannesburg when she heard about the rioting on the radio. She dismissed it as ordinary, criminal-type violence, the kind that plagued the townships. Then suddenly her boss sent the workers home early: Soweto is burning, she said. Nomkhitha hurried to her train. As it pulled into Soweto’s Mzimhlope Station, Nomkhitha and the other passengers exclaimed in amazement at the smoking hulks of cars, burned-out bottle stores, scenes of looting. They had never seen anything like it. Nomkhitha rushed home, worried about the children.
Joseph arrived just after Nomkhitha, deeply shaken by the destruction he had seen. Mpho had also returned, and the family gathered in the living room to talk. The children excitedly told their parents of the demonstration, of the police attack, of their response, of Tsietsi’s role in the day’s events. Nomkhitha and Joseph were astounded. How could youngsters have marched so great a distance? How could they have had the courage to fight the police? How did Tsietsi come to be so involved? ‘Why Tsietsi?’ Joseph kept murmuring. ‘Why Tsietsi?’ The march seemed the height of folly to Joseph; surely the family would now feel the full wrath of the authorities.
Nomkhitha too was distressed. She interrogated Dee and Mpho about their involvement, convinced they had deceived her. The two boys insisted they had merely got swept up in the moment; Tsietsi was the leader and organizer. That fact only caused Nomkhitha more anguish. She could not understand why Tsietsi, her favourite, had not confided in her. Nomkhitha wondered what would become of him now. How would he eat and where would he sleep?
The children talked among themselves late into the night, long after their bemused parents had retired to their bedroom. At one point they heard a deep rumble of heavy machinery on the tarred road. The government was deploying ‘hippos’, armoured personnel carriers which had been designed to withstand the blasts of land mines in war zones such as Namibia and Rhodesia. The noise terrified Tshepiso, who lay motionless among his brothers. He could not stop worrying about Tsietsi. You must not come home, Tshepiso whispered to the darkness. Run away and hide, or you will be caught.
Tsietsi was not coming home; he would not spend another night in his parents’ house. Sometime around midnight, he and a fellow student knocked on the door of Drake Koka’s home in Soweto’s Dube section. Drake, a small, pixie-like man with a round face and goatee, was a major figure in the Black Consciousness movement and a union activist. ‘We need your help,’ said Tsietsi, who had been on the run since the morning’s shootings. ‘You have to teach us. You’ll be our Godfather, like in the movie.’
By now, the police had killed at least twenty-five children and injured 200 others. Large swathes of Soweto lay in ruins. South Africa, and the Mashinini family, would never be the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Children
The rioting in Soweto continued for two more days. Battles raged throughout the township: bands of angry youths set fire to government buildings, throwing stones and bottles at the assembled police. It spread to central Johannesburg when about 300 white students at the University of the Witwatersrand marched from the campus to protest against the indiscriminate killing of schoolchildren in Soweto. Several hundred black workers joined in the demonstration. About a hundred white vigilantes, brandishing knives, metal pipes and clubs, attacked the demonstrators; arriving at the scene, a group of security officers beat the marchers with batons.
Soweto’s near-anarchy, and the government’s response, stunned South Africans. Not since the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960 had they witnessed anything of this magnitude. Editorials in the English-language press, the voice of the white opposition, blamed the Nationalist government for ignoring an obviously volatile situation. They demanded an immediate accession to the students’ demands. Some black newspapers called for an end to apartheid itself.
But the Nationalists – at least publicly – professed to be as shocked as anyone. The Minister of Justice and Police, James Kruger, told members of Parliament that the government did ‘not expect anything like this to happen’; agitators, he said, were to blame. To quell the unrest, the government sent 1,500 police into Soweto and effectively sealed off the township. Armed with automatic rifles and other guns, the security men appeared to shoot randomly into the crowds of black youngsters; often, they simply fired from their moving vehicles. The police also shot at people out of the helicopters that dropped tear gas on the township.
Their tactics worked. By the end of the third day, the fighting began to abate. Nearly 200 people had died; thousands of others were wounded. One hundred and thirty-nine buildings and 143 vehicles, many of them belonging to the police, had been demolished or wrecked. But the uprising was hardly finished. Like a forest fire that sputters and dies, only to re-ignite elsewhere, violence erupted in countless other townships across the country.
In Soweto, the police started to raid the Mashininis’ home at night, ostensibly looking for Tsietsi. The first raid was terrifying. The police came at about two o’clock in the morning, blocking off the surrounding streets with their ‘hippos’. Nomkhitha and Joseph awoke to a deafening pounding on the door; torches shone in every window, illuminating the policemen with their guns drawn. They screamed in Afrikaans to open the door. Joseph let them in and about a dozen security men, black and white, rampaged through the house, shining their lights in the eyes of the sleep-dazed children, pawing through wardrobes, peering under beds and behind the stove, tearing apart furnishings
