I had another confession in mind, but once I read Rethabile’s post 16 June 1976, I had to confess to something different. Rethabile said,
I was fifteen, but I remember the events of 16 June 1976 like it was last week. Black kids rose against the Apartheid state in South Africa, and refused Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. They stamped their collective foot and said “No!” And their cry shook the world. Police opened fire and the first kid to go down was Hector Pieterson. I know you’ve seenthe now famous picture of his limp body in the hands of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister running alongside them.
I say, I was nineteen. Tied up in my small white life, worried about things that no longer matter. I have dull recall of Apartheid, a strangely exotic word that meant little, at first, against the celebrations of America’s bicentennial. I probably watched the Jackson’s on TV that night, their first show. I don’t remember. News archives list the breaking news as US ambassadors killed in Lebanon and how Carter was polling against Ford.
Harry Reasoner said students were killed in South Africa, but didn’t say children, didn’t say how many, how brutally, and numbered the two white people pulled from cars and stoned.
I said then, and now, that Apartheid was wrong. But I say it in the comfort on my small room, alone. With no one to hear. What will I do differently from now on?
(January has her usual confessions roll call, too. Here.)
Related posts:
The confessions that you don’t plan on making are usually the best ones.
Apartheid touches us all. I don’t have any answers. It’s hard to know what to do and how to help when there are so many people and places in need of aid. But I think if we’re just more aware that we are a global community, not just a local one, solutions present themselves in large and small ways.
Thanks, January. I hope you’re right. I hope that my daily decisions help.