Causes Of The Soweto Uprising

The Soweto uprising of 1976 was a volcanic eruption that led to years of resistance in other parts of South Africa. The June 16 Soweto uprising was a result of the apartheid government making inconsiderate decisions which they thought would be beneficial to everybody, more specifically the ‘superior race’ in South Africa. What the government didn’t realise was that their actions were only making things in South Africa worse. These apartheid policies were the main cause of the Soweto Uprising. As much as the government introduced the policies that only infuriated the people, the Black Consciousness Movement and its other organisations swooped in and gave people solutions to their mounding problems. One can’t say that they were the main cause

The government spent fifteen times more on the education of white children in South Africa. (Source H). The education system was introduced in 1953. Black children were taught under BANTU education which took away their history, culture and identity. The source also says that the system was created to teach the learners to become “Hewers of wood and drawers of water” in a white-run economy. (Source J). This system made black people feel inferior from white people. They felt worthless because they had no identity and they were forced to become people that they weren’t. Children were struggling in school because of the immense language barrier. Most if not all the children grew up in a home where they spoke vernacular so the shift from African languages to Afrikaans was a difficult process to go through, as they were used to this language being the language of the ‘white man’. Being trained to become someone’s slave would have made anybody angry to the point where they would retaliate in the form of

When the new education laws came to pass the Black Consciousness Movement began to get more involved as they also had student organizations. The Black Consciousness Movement wasn’t an organization like most political movements, is was an attitude of the mind that aimed to raise the self-respect and confidence of black people, to liberate themselves and to promote unity amongst black people by mobilizing them to fight against apartheid, in particular against the division cause by separate development.(Source A). They also wrote newsletters that aimed at criticizing all racially segregated sports bodies, government policies, to discourage foreign investments. The Black Consciousness came up with many organizations but the ones that stood out the most were the student organizations, the South African Students Organization and the South African Student Movement. All these student organizations played a role as the driving force behind the Black Consciousness Movement with Steve Biko as their leader. Biko believed that using the term ‘black’ would be a direct challenge to the apartheid term of ‘on-white’. He also believed that Africans needed to see themselves as black again, this way they would be taking the first step to liberation and reclaiming their identity which was taken away