The day of 16 June 1976 began peacefully in Soweto. Student leaders at high schools across the sprawling Johannesburg township, to which the apartheid regime had exiled hundreds of thousands of black South Africans, took charge of the morning assemblies. They led their fellow students into the streets and began to march toward Orlando stadium.
The students were protesting against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Their teachers barely spoke the white minority language and the students did not want to learn the oppressor’s language. They were tired of the intentionally substandard Bantu education, tired of being second-class citizens.
