Roots & Culture by Chambers Eddie;

Author:Chambers, Eddie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4791304
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

And this a year after Steel Pulse had railed against the Ku Klux Klan in a track taken from their Handsworth Revolution album.12 Jamaican reggae tended to eschew explicit links to formal campaigns but in Britain, John Plummer perceived such contributions by British reggae acts as ‘an indication of a growing involvement in contemporary issues’.13

Figure 16: March Against Apartheid in Trafalgar Square, 2 November 1986.

As mentioned earlier, a highly significant component of Black Britain towards a Pan-Africanist sentiment in the 1970s was the ongoing bloody and highly emotive struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Two events in particular had profound effects on the political awareness of Black Britain. On 16 June 1976, police opened fire on unarmed schoolchildren who were staging a peaceful demonstration against the Bantu Education system in Soweto. Large numbers were killed, leading many, perhaps for the first time, to begin to appreciate the South African state’s vicious attempts to suppress Black South Africans’ demonstrations and protestations against apartheid, in this instance schoolchildren protesting against being taught in Afrikaans, a language they perceived to be that of their oppressors.

Out of these awful events there came the iconic photograph by South African photographer, Sam Nzima, of the slain body of schoolboy Hector Pieterson, the first casualty of the Soweto uprising. The solitary frame of this celebrated photograph quickly came to symbolise the barbarity of the apartheid system and its wilful predilection for destroying Black lives, including those of schoolchildren. At the time, the Soweto uprising represented the latest bloody and violent episode in the anti-apartheid struggle. Those above a certain age could remember the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960,14 but for those not yet born in 1960, or those who were small children at the time, the Soweto uprising represented their first comprehension, as teenagers or young adults, of the barbarity of the apartheid regime.

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