The Soweto Uprising: a web guide

Thirty years ago this morning, thousands of black students and children in Soweto, the sprawling township on the edge of apartheid Johannesburg, gathered to protest the use of Afrikaans, the language of white authority, in their schools.

By the end of the day, 23 people, including two young boys, Hector Pieterson and Hastings Ndlovu, had been shot dead by panicking, poorly trained police and photographs of the brutality were making their way to the front pages of newspapers around the world. You can download The Times original coverage here

The killings set off days of rioting in Soweto and sympathy protests, many of which turned violent, across the country. For many historians of apartheid, the summer of 1976 marked the moment when the struggle for racial equality in South Africa started to progress from a foreign-based guerilla initiative to a mass movement with history on its side.

For a straightforward history of the uprising and its consequences, try this briefing. The page carries a famous letter from Desmond Tutu, then the Anglican Dean of Johannesburg, to the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, just six weeks before the riots:

"I am writing to you, Sir, because I have a growing nightmarish fear that unless something drastic is done very soon then bloodshed and violence are going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably."

Much of the South African coverage of today's anniversary has used the riots to ask how far the country has come, and to compare the clarity of the anti-apartheid struggle to the more opaque world of current South African politics.

Johannesburg's Mail & Guardian asks whether direct protest still fits into a post-apartheid world. Last year President Thabo Mbeki said: “We must stop this business of people going into the street."

Under the headline, "Lest We Forget", The Sowetan, a protest newspaper founded in 1981, appears to mourn a lost sense of purpose. A front page cartoon compares the iconic image of a dying Hector Pieterson in 1976 alongside a modern couple carrying a drunk teenager:

"He's passed out again," reads the caption.

For more reminsciences: The Sunday Times has an extract from the memoirs of Sibongile Mkhabela, the only woman in the "Soweto 11", who were charged with sedition for their role in the uprising. Here is an article from The Black Sash in 1979 describing their trial: "They looked, fit, slim, shiningly clean."