Warwick Johnston was a 28-year-old teacher in a Soweto school when his students streamed out of the classroom to join protests that changed South Africa’s apartheid history.
Now the Richmond historian has pored through his scrapbooks filled with news clippings and recalled his experiences to write his latest book, Amandla ’76 The Soweto Uprising Revisited which commemorates the 50th anniversary of their activism.
The title translates to power to the people, which drove his young students to join other black Africans in a bid to change their future that day.
Warwick and his wife Jane had intended to overland the length of the continent in 1975, but they were running short of money when he saw an advertisement for an English-speaking teacher at Jabulani College in Soweto, and their plans changed.
For a couple who had grown up in New Zealand, apartheid was shocking. Yet teaching a class of black African young men whose enthusiasm and a desire to learn despite the challenges was inspiring, and he describes his time with them as “brilliant”.
“I loved it and they were happy – in the sense I didn’t boss them around.”
He taught for 20 months in the school and watched the resentment and frustration grow against an apartheid education system designed to train them for low-skilled work only.
Part of his role involved visiting other schools in Soweto, where classrooms often held more than 50, without electricity and with a restricted curriculum.
“To add to the insult, the central government decreed at the beginning of ’76 that important subjects would be taught in Afrikaans.”
It was the language associated with their oppressor and was the spark that ignited the Soweto student uprising on 16 June.
“I went to school that day because it was the exam day and it was very quiet. Most of us (teachers) noticed the kids were quite tense. Once the exam was over they just disappeared, and almost immediately the Afrikaans officials told us to get out because there were riots.
“We were told to keep driving because if we stopped we would be dead because we were white. I didn’t know it at the time, but the police had already opened fire and the first African students had been killed.”
He returned to school in July amid continuing student strikes and protests that were met by a brutal response from the South African government. A smaller number of students still turned up for class, but he learnt some of the young men from his class had been killed in the uprising.
By September, they needed to renew their visas and were told they had to leave the country immediately. To get rid of the furniture in their Johannesburg apartment, which bordered Soweto, Warwick offered it to black African teachers at the school.
“Saturday morning they turned up and started taking out furniture from our apartment which was in a white area. That prompted riot police to turn up. But after an explanation, the white police were helping Africans move the furniture and they thought it was hilarious. They could see the humour in it.”
During his research for the book, he spoke to one other Kiwi who was in Soweto at the time of the uprising, working as a funeral director. While officials reported an estimated 172 young people were killed in June and August riots and 1,439 injured, the Kiwi funeral director told him the death toll was higher.
Fifty years on, Warwick acknowledges that many New Zealanders remember 1976 primarily for the All Blacks' controversial tour of South Africa, which took place weeks after the uprising. But he believes the lessons of Soweto — about racism, inequality and the power of young people to demand change — remain as relevant as ever.
