Hector Pieterson

Hector Pieterson was 12 years old when police killed him on June 16, 1976, during a protest by Black students that marked the beginning of the Soweto Uprising in South Africa. His death was captured in a photograph by Sam Nzima that generated international outrage and intensified condemnation of South Africa’s apartheid government. Pieterson and Hastings Ndlovu, who was also a student, were the first Black protesters killed during the Soweto Uprising.

Soweto and the origins of student protests in the 1970s

Located southwest of Johannesburg, the urban residential area of Soweto is a product of South Africa’s apartheid policies, which were formalized into law beginning in the 1940s and still have effects today, even though these laws were eliminated in the 1990s.

Soweto had its origins in the informal housing and infrastructure built by Black workers arriving from rural areas to pursue livelihoods in and around Johannesburg, particularly during the 1920s and ’30s. In the 1940s the South African government established greater control over the area and maintained it, in keeping with its apartheid policies, as a place for Black people from a variety of ethnic groups, separated from those the government identified as belonging to other races. Soweto was a source of anti-apartheid protest and activism beginning in the middle decades of the 20th century.

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Hector Pieterson was born on August 19, 1963, the only boy among his mother and father’s four children. He was attending school in Soweto when, in 1974, South Africa’s Department of Bantu Education established the Afrikaans Medium Decree, a policy that directed higher primary and secondary schools attended by Black students in the Transvaal province—which included Soweto—to use Afrikaans as the language of instruction for some subjects. English was the dominant language of Black residents, while Afrikaans was the language of white South Africans, which meant that Black South Africans considered Afrikaans to be “the language of the oppressor,” as Desmond Tutu explained. Additionally, the new policy would negatively affect Black students’ education because many were not fluent in Afrikaans.

As efforts to stop implementation of the policy continued, organizations such as the Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steve Biko, and the South African Students’ Organisation contributed to anti-apartheid sentiment among students in Soweto and elsewhere. Eventually, as Afrikaans was more widely imposed on schools in 1976, thousands of Black students engaged in boycotts and demonstrations, protesting against the change in language policy.

Pieterson’s death and the escalation of the Soweto Uprising

On the morning of June 16, 1976, a group of student protesters that grew to an estimated 10,000 people marched and sang through the streets of Soweto, where they were intercepted by a sizable armed police force. As Pieterson’s sister Antoinette Sithole recalled in 2022, her brother joined the protest, which she was part of, as it passed his primary school; organizers had not intended younger students to participate. Although accounts of the confrontation differ, it is clear that the police used tear gas against the demonstrators and then fired guns at them indiscriminately.

When the police began to shoot, the crowd scattered. In the chaos, Sithole later recounted, she saw her brother being carried by another protester, and together they rushed for help. Though they reached a clinic, Pieterson had already died. He, along with 15-year-old Hastings Ndlovu, who also died that day, were the first Black protesters shot and killed by police during the Soweto Uprising.

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The march had now escalated to large-scale violence. Days of rioting and violence in Soweto as well as elsewhere in South Africa followed. What had begun as a demonstration against a language policy transformed into a broader struggle against the entire apartheid system. A government commission in South Africa claimed in 1976 that 575 people had died and 3,907 were injured as a result of the uprising; these numbers are disputed and considered too low.

Pieterson’s legacy

Pieterson became a symbol of the Soweto Uprising and the struggle against apartheid after the photojournalist Sam Nzima of The World newspaper took a series of photographs of Pieterson being carried by 18-year-old student Mbuyisa Makhubo. In the most famous and most widely circulated of Nzima’s photos, Pieterson’s sister Antoinette is alongside Makhubo, who has a limp, bloodied Pieterson in his arms. That photo was published around the world, provoking international outrage at South Africa’s apartheid regime.

On June 19, 1976, three days after the uprising began, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 392, which condemned South Africa’s government “for its resort to massive violence against and killings of the African people including schoolchildren and students and others opposing racial discrimination.”

On June 16, 2002, Soweto’s first museum, the Hector Pieterson Museum, opened two blocks from where Pieterson was shot. South Africa now commemorates the anniversary of Pieterson’s death as a national holiday called Youth Day. Both Pieterson and Ndlovu are buried in the Avalon Cemetery in Soweto.