Youth Day

Tonight I saw the film ‘Sarafina’ for the first time. I am partly embarrassed as this locally produced film was released in 1992 and only the melancholy of Youth Day, fourteen years later, seems to have convinced me to finally see it. In the cinema I was upset to see the poor turnout a day after the film’s re-release. Perhaps everyone has seen the musical apartheid protest film with Whoopi Goldberg. God knows it must have even been screened on SABC3 by now. But I hadn’t seen it. It was ironic watching the film in Hyde Park – a center colonized by the opulent white crème and a sprinkling of rainbow nation on top.

I have discovered that the only way one can ‘remember’ something like June 16th is by holding onto a small piece of it. Usually the piece is iconic and very popular. June 16th 1976 is Hector Pieterson. The photograph, taken by Sam Nzima, depicts Hector being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo running alongside Hector’s sister Antoinette. He was one of 500 casualties that day. I’m not sure everyone remembers that the schoolchildren were protesting against Afrikaans as a forced medium of instruction. I don’t think anyone remembers the sight of bloodied school uniforms face down in the street or the smell of petrol bombs. Surely no one remembers the live ammunition or even the courage of the Youth that faced it in broad daylight.

The museums are for the cultured, the interested. A holocaust survivor comes to our school. School trips to the museum. Films, pictures, songs. What do I have left? What I have learnt? Let me have Hector Pieterson, so that I can remember.