After the funerals of the first wave of children and youths killed by the police, at each successive burial black people were shot while gathered to pay homage to their dead or at the washing of hands at the house of the bereaved that is their custom. The police said it was impossible to distinguish between mourners and the mob; and they spoke more truly than they knew — mourning and anger were fused.
Although the white personnel at the hospital had knowledge of events and consequences in the black townships only touched upon by the reports in the newspapers gathered, among dangers and difficulties, by black journalists, no one of the white hospital staff could go into the places from which the patients came. Extracting bullets from the matrix of flesh, picking out slivers of shattered bone, sewing, succouring, dripping back into arteries the vital fluids that flowed away in the streets with the liquor from bottles smashed by children who despised their fathers’ consolations, these white people could not imagine what it was like to be living as their patients did. Rosa was visited one Sunday night in her flat by an acquaintance, Fats Mxenge. He apologized for turning up without warning, but it was not wise to use the telephone although (of course) he was one of the few people in Soweto to have one. He had a message; when it had been delivered he sat in her flat (a one-roomed ‘studio’ affair she had moved into when she returned from Europe) and accepted the brandy and hot tea she offered. He looked around him; someone brought aboard out of a tempest and seeing drawn curtains, lamplight, the turntable of the player circling where a record had just been lifted. He tossed off the brandy and then stirred the tea, knees close, stirred and stirred. Shook his head in summation — gave up. They exchanged the obvious. — Terrible, it’s terrible, man. I just want to get my kids out, that’s all. — She began to talk of some of the things she had seen at the hospital, not in her department: a little girl who had lost an eye; she was used to working with horrors (she used the word ‘deformities’) about which something could be done — nerves slowly brought back to feeling, muscles strengthened to flex again. — The left eye. Seven or eight years old. Gone for good. — She was not able to describe the black hole, the void she was seeing where the eye ought to be. — Last week the man who lives in the next house to us — you know our place? you’ve been there with Marisa — just there, the next house, he went out to buy something at the shop, candles, something his mother wanted. Never came back. She came over — she says, what must she do? Go to the police, my wife told her, ask them where he is — she thought he’s arrested. So the woman goes to the police and asks, where is my son, where can I look for him. D‘you know what they told that woman? ‘Don’t ask us here, go to the mortuary.’—
— I pass by on my way home. There’s been a queue outside every day. — A bus queue of black men and women waited, orderly, to lift up sheet after sheet to find the familiar face among the dead. There were babies, of course, asleep, warm and wet against backs under the blanket, there are always babies. There were the usual shopping bags that lug newspaper parcels of sustenance to courts and hospitals and prisons; one woman had a plaid Thermos flask sticking up out of her bag — the queue was long, and some people would have to come back next day.
— The police must’ve shot him between our place and the shop. Shot dead. She identified him all right. Just there in his own street, man. It was about nine at night when he went out, that’s all. You lock yourself in and stay home as soon as it’s dark. You don’t move, man. I won’t go back tonight, a-a-h no! I can tell you — when it’s dark I’m afraid to go across my yard to the lavatory. I never know when I’m going to get a bullet in my head from the police or a knife in me from someone else. — He shook back shirt cuffs with square gilt and enamel links. He was dressed for success and happiness, his usual snappy clothes, like a woman who has nothing to hand in an emergency but the outfit she wore to dinner last night and left hanging over the chair when she went to bed. — Every morning I expect to find my car burned out. We’ve got no garages in our places. What can I do? It stands in the street. The students are going around setting fire to the cars of reps and so on, people who have good jobs with white firms… Who doesn’t work for whites? If they know the owner of such-and-such a car is a sports promoter who arranges boxing matches with whites… They can come after me… — His laugh was an exclamation, protest. — What this government has done to us. Can I just — She pushed the brandy bottle over to him and he helped himself. She tipped the last drops of tea out of her cup and poured brandy into it, taking a first sip that burned along her lips voluptuously while she listened. — I want to get my kids out, that’s all. Margaret and the baby can go down to Natal with the old lady — her people are there. I want to put the older kids in boarding-school somewhere… But you know what the students are saying? They’re going to go to the trains when the kids leave for schools in the country and they’re going to stop them, they’re going to drag them off the trains. They say no one must break the boycott. And they’ll do it, I’m telling you, they’ll do it. I’ll take mine away by car. They don’t listen to me or their mother, there’s no school, they run in the streets and how d’you know every day they’re going to come back alive?—
— I don’t know what I would do. — She was white, she had never had a child, only a lover with children by some other woman. No child but those who passed under her hands, whom it was her work to put together again if that were possible, at the hospital.
SOWETO STUDENTS REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL
Black people of Azania remember our beloved dead! Martyers who were massacred from the 16th June 1976 and are still being murdered. We should know Vorster’s terrorists wont stop their aggressive approach on innocent Students and people who have dedicated themselves to the liberation of the Black man in South Africa — Azania. They shall try at all costs to suppress the feelings of the young men and women who see liberation a few kilometres if not metres There’s no more turning back, we have reached a point of no return as the young generation in this challenging country. We have proved that we are capable of changing the country’s laws as youths this we shall persue until we reach the ultimate goat — UHURU FOR AZANIA.
Remember Hector Peterson the 13 year old Black child of Azania, a future leader we might have produced, fell victim to Kruger’s uncompromising and uncontrollable gangsters of the riot squad. What does his parents say, what do his friends say, what does the stupid and baldheaded soldier who killed — actually murdered him in cold blood — say, of course he is less concerned. What do you say as an oppressed Black and brother to Hector? Remember our learned scientist ‘who decided to commit suicide all of a sudden’ Tshazibane? We suspect that somebody somewhere knows something about this ‘suicide’ For how long will our people persue with these ‘suicide attempt’ and ‘successful suicides’.
Remember Mabelane who ‘attempted to escape from John Vorster Square by jumping through the 10th floor window’ apparently avoiding some questions? Remember our crippled brothers and sisters who have been disabled deliberately by people who have been trained to disrespect and disregard a black man as a human being? Remember the blood that flowed continuously caused by wounds inflicted by Vorster’s gangsters upon the innocent mass demonstrating peacefully? What about the bodies of our dead colleagues which were dragged into those monsterous and horrible looking riot squad vehicles called hippos? We the students shall continue to shoulder the wagon of liberation irrespective of these racists maneouvers to delay the inevitable liberation of the Black masses. June the 16th will never be erased in our minds. It shall stand known and registered in the minds of the people as STUDENTS’ DAY as students have proved beyond all reasonable doubt on that DAY that they are capable of playing an important role in the liberation of this country without arms.