I’ll remember Joe – Joseph Seshigo Matthew Latakgomo – mostly for the story of 1976, the story of black South Africans and of the oppressed around the world.
Joe and his courageous team started with bits of information and built it into a story that reverberated around the globe.
In 1976, Joe was acting editor of The World newspaper while his senior, Percy Qoboza, was in the US on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Ironically, Qoboza landed back at Jan Smuts Airport on the morning of June 16.
Joe and his team: some like Willie Bokala and Duma Ndlovu are still around, others like photographer Sam Nzima and writer Sophie Tema have transitioned to the world yonder.
Joe’s team started picking up scraps of information, nothing pointing to a world-changing story. It started with pupils at the Orlando West Junior secondary school (where my uncle Charles Mpulo was principal) who refused to be taught in Afrikaans as the government had decreed. They started by staying out of class and then smashing things and burning teachers’ cars.
“Children in Soweto are dying! I’ll be there all day.”
— Joseph Seshigo Matthew Latakgomo
The reporters who were covering these incidents developed relations with the pupils. It developed to the point where Willie Bokala’s house in White City Jabavu – we called it the Palm Tree - became the unofficial headquarters of the pupils to leave or collect messages. They got to trust Bokala and his teammates and the circle included people like Gabu Tugwana.
Yes, I will always remember June 16, 1976: I was at the Drum magazine offices in Eloff Street Extension, ticking away at my typewriter, doing reviews of records I had been listening to all weekend, when another great journalist, Stan Motjuwadi, shouted from across the newsroom after getting a phone call.
“Children in Soweto are dying! I’ll be there all day.”
He phoned later to say it was true – police were killing children.
Joe’s team had their fingers on the pulse. They knew that the pupils were planning to gather outside the Holy Cross Church, near where the Hector Pieterson Museum stands today, and then from there march en masse to the Orlando Stadium, a few kilometres down the road, and there decide whether to march to the offices of the department of education in the city.
Just as the pupils were getting together, police in armoured vehicles drove into them, shooting randomly at defenceless children. Hector Pieterson was shot. Sam Nzima snapped the pictures and Sophie tried to use the press car to get Hector to a doctor.
Sam’s pictures were flashed on screens and news pages around the world, demonstrating the obscenity between power and inequality.
I went to our editor then, Philip Selwyn-Smith, and told him I couldn’t be writing nice stories when my children were dying. I got into my Beetle and drove to Soweto. Before long, I bumped into a roadblock manned by children who had broken into a bottle store.
When I told them I was a journalist, they waved me into the township – and gave me two bottles of beer. The closed bottle ended up on my back seat and the open one between my feet, which I waved as a passport every time I was stopped by the angry pupils.
Past Phefeni, Inhlazane, Merafe, and Naledi railway stations – each one of them had a bottle store conveniently built at the exit – they had all been smashed and the booze looted. That explained why I had been earlier presented with beers for safe passage.
The township was smashed. Burning carcasses of cars and delivery vans, rocks … the townships that made up Soweto had been wrecked. Bleeding people were at taps washing off their wounds.
Lala ka kagiso, Bitso. Tell those who preceded you on this journey that we continue our struggle for justice, peace and prosperity the way they taught us to. That struggle will not be abandoned until man learns to love his or her fellow men and women. We believe that day will dawn as did June 16 1976. These are lessons mankind is still learning.
Tshedisegang Sis Angie le botlhe ba lapa la Latakgomo le ditsala tsotlhe tsa lapa.
Joe Thloloe is a former Press Ombudsman.
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