OPINION | Black Wednesday was not just about press freedom, it was also a push back against mass uprising

Yesterday marked the 48th anniversary of Black Wednesday, which, in “the new” SA, has come to be known as National Press Freedom Day.

However, it cannot be emphasised enough that the clampdown by the apartheid state on that day was not just targeted at the media and journalists but was a broad offensive aimed at breaking the back of the internal resistance movement, whose sustained struggles were threatening to topple the regime.

The media fraternity, today, cannot be blamed for appropriating the day and using it to promote press freedom and to highlight some of the hazards and challenges confronting practitioners and the industry as a whole.

After all, on that day in 1977, the apartheid government banned the World and Weekend World newspapers as well as the Pro Veritate Christian journal and detained outspoken editors and journalists such as the legendary Percy Qoboza.

In an editorial marking the first anniversary of Black Wednesday, Qoboza was to write in another newspaper that the government’s determination to silence the black press was a threat to the media as a whole.

“If it happened to The World and it continues to happen to black journalists, then white journalists and white newspapermen cannot afford to be comfortable. It is us today; it will be them tomorrow. South Africa — black and white — will be the ultimate sufferer as the despicable erosion of human liberties continues unabated,” Qoboza wrote.

However, the commemoration of Black Wednesday only as “press freedom day” robs us, especially those who were either too young or were not born by 1977, of a historical context that extends beyond the two newspapers and links directly to the Black Consciousness Movement-led resistance struggles that dominated most of the 1970s.

Missing in the story are the South African Students’ Organisation, the Black People’s Convention, the Soweto Teachers Action Committee, the Black Parents Association, the Black Women’s Federation, the Soweto Students Representative Council, the National Youth Organisation, the Natal Youth Organisation and the rest of the other 18 organisations that were also outlawed that day.

Missing in the story is the 1976 students’ uprising that had started in Soweto on June 16 of that year but, despite brutal suppression by the state that claimed hundreds of lives within weeks, spread across the country, affecting schools and universities.

A year later, police and army bullets and dogs were still struggling to put down the insurrection, and so the government resorted to detentions, bannings and the outlawing of organisations and news publications that were believed to be giving voice to the students.

A month before the bannings, the apartheid security police beat the Black Consciousness Movement leader, Steve Biko, to death as part of that general repression campaign.

Scores were picked up and detained without trial, while others were sent to Robben Island and other prisons for activities associated with the Black Consciousness Movement, the banned Pan Africanist Congress, the banned African National Congress and the banned SA Communist Party.

To the apartheid regime, Black Wednesday was not just about cracking down on uppity newspapers and their editors but, fundamentally, about pushing back against the rising tide of a mass uprising.

It is important that the story is told in full, not just for posterity. In today’s SA, where many black communities are confronted by various societal crises — some of which threaten their very survival — there are valuable lessons that can be gleaned from carefully studying some of the organisations that were banned on the day.

One of them, for instance, was the Black Community Programmes (BCP), which Biko and others had created in line with the principles of black self-reliance.

Among the BCP’s initiatives were the building of the Zanempilo community health care centre in Qonce (formerly King William’s Town) and Solempilo in KwaZulu-Natal. After her banning in 1977, Dr Mamphela Ramphele started a similar initiative, called Isutheng, in Tzaneen.

Knowing that history, we would not be quick to exalt the right-wing Solidarity Movement — which includes AfriForum — for seeking to build their own independent university and other institutions as if there had never been efforts at self-reliance driven by black activists in the past.

From the example of the Black Parents Association, which was also banned in 1977, modern communities can gain valuable lessons on how parents can get actively involved in improving schooling in the communities where they live. If the BPA could strive to do so under trying circumstances, with a government that was not willing to give them an ear, imagine what can be achieved in a democratic society.

In two years’ time, we will mark the 50th anniversary of Black Wednesday. Hopefully by then, society would have come to realise that the date is about more than just press freedom — it marks yet another failed attempt by our erstwhile rulers to dim the light of freedom that has burnt for generations in our collective hearts.