Some dates carry more weight than others, and 12 June is one that South Africa never quite shook off.
1964: This was the day the Rivonia Trial reached its end, when Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and their co-accused were handed life sentences. Everyone in that Pretoria courtroom had braced for the death penalty, so when Justice Quartus de Wet chose life imprisonment instead, there was almost a strange, heavy relief. Mandela himself later said he walked from the dock ready to die, yet here he was being sent to Robben Island for what looked like forever. It always gets me that a single afternoon in our own city set the whole next thirty years in motion.
1986: Exactly twenty-two years later, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Soweto uprising, P.W. Botha’s government declared a nationwide State of Emergency. It was sweeping and brutal, giving the security forces enormous power to detain people without trial, and thousands were rounded up in the weeks that followed. Newspapers were censored so heavily that you’d see blank columns where the stories should have been. My folks always talked about how that winter felt, the sense that the lid was being screwed down hard, even as everyone could feel it wouldn’t hold.
1986: That same emergency also tells you how frightened the state had become of memory itself. They timed the crackdown precisely so that 16 June, the day the schoolchildren of Soweto had marched and died, couldn’t be marked openly. You can learn a lot about who holds power by watching which anniversaries they try to silence. In the end it backfired, because forbidding remembrance only made people hold on tighter to what they were told to forget.
Funny how one date can hold both the moment a government tried to bury our future, and every reason that future arrived anyway.
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