[From the Toronto Star, June 12, 2010]
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA—Gloria Pikitsha stands at the corner of her old high school and recalls the moments before the first gunshot. It was June 16, 1976, when white police officers came to Orlando West High School in Soweto to stare down several thousand black students who’d had enough. One side was armed with rocks and recklessness, the other lethal artillery and the imperviousness apartheid allowed.
Voices escalated, the rocks exchanged fire with bullets and Gloria ran home to hide under a bed. The fighting ratcheted up, the army joined the police and before the Soweto uprising was beaten down a day and a half later, hundreds of children had died in one of the grimmest episodes of South Africa’s bleak and bloody era.
Adrian Brijbassi 