Human Rights Violation Hearings — Soweto — 1996-07-23

MURPHY MOROBE: I think from the point of view of SASEM and the Action Committee, after June 16th Government closed all the schools.  The various representations that Mr Mosala spoke about today from some of the committees were taking place in the month of June leading up to July.  In July, because
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after June 16th even our own members of the Action Committee, you know, became very dispersed because the police began hunting for us.  I went on the run from the day onwards, I went into hiding.  It was difficult to regroup again because schools were closed.  If schools were closed we could not have our meetings because those were our bases from which we could operate and connect with each other.
 We then began a campaign in July calling on Government to reopen the schools.  It was important from the point of view of us, as student leaders at the time, to be able to reorganise students and to try to bring some semblance of order to the situation, but from the point of view of the struggle in general, it was also important for us because our own consciousness developed where we were able, through the actions of the police even, to see the connection between what we were doing on June 16th and the broader questions of liberation.  Black Consciousness also at that time was not just about conscintisation, it was conscintisation with a view towards getting us to a point where we could for liberation as human beings who are conscious of themselves and we have something to do.  We then went about calling for the opening of schools which was done by the end of July. 
 We were then able to regroup as the Action Committee and at the end of July we then, a meeting, a public meeting was called in this Church at Reginamunde.  This was on the first of August 1976 and at that meeting, having had discussions with Tsietsie Mashanini and others in the Action Committee.  We then came up upon the idea that we should establish a more representative body of students.  That is when the idea of the Soweto Students Representative Council 
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came up.  We then announced at the meeting that was held here at Reginamunde that we are going to establish this organisation and we are asking students that were present and those that came from different schools to send representatives to a meeting that will be held of the SSRC at Morris Isaacson High School the following Monday.  Which meeting took place and the SSRC was duly established on the second of August 1976.  
 One of the first actions we took as the SSRC was to organise for another march because we were convinced that for as long as we kept our campaigns in Soweto, the police would do anything they liked with us, but we wanted to take this campaign into the city now.  We decided on a march that will take us into Johannesburg from Soweto.  This was organised for the fourth of August, but because we also wanted to bring in our parents and our elders into the activities, we then also organised for a stay-away, you know.  We, for the first time, we used the instrument called Azikwelo because our reading of our history told us that once upon a time there was once a campaign called Azikwelo and which our parents used effectively in the 1950's and the 1940's and we brought that back in and introduced it in 1976.  I think it was quite an important breakthrough for us because for the first time on that day on the fourth of August we were able to have parents being involved in that march.  Even as police stopped us and began to shoot we were able to actually begin to use that to bring parents and students together.  
 So there were a number of such campaigns because as our posters began to show, we began calling not only for Afrikaans to be scrapped or Bantu education, but we began to SOWETO HEARING GAUTENG PROVINCE
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call for the end of the apartheid system because in our mind and those of us who were involved in SASEM, we believed, you know, we really believed as young people then that the time for revolution has come, you know, and that really propelled us to actually continue the momentum because we felt that keeping the home fires burning, amongst other things, it meant that moments like this must be used by us to the fullest to continue organising people so that we can prepare the ground for organisations like the ANC and other banned organisations to come back.  
 It was through those processes that our interaction with people like Joe Gqabi, for example, of the ANC continued.  He was banned, we could not meet in his house.  Each time we came into his house we did not speak, you know, everything will be written down on paper and we will just exchange paper because the houses would be bugged and after all those papers, he would take all those papers and burn them up and throw them away or we would go to the rails in Mfula, in Mfula Park and we will sit there, about eight, nine pm and we will talk about issues that we are involved in and they will help us to have much more broader perspective and the need for us to try to bring things under control and not to allow the system to give it any other excuses just to willy nilly shoot and kill people.  So we were getting those kinds of inputs.  
 I think that because of the kind of violence that we received from the police, even in subsequent campaigns, Nomavenda Mashiyane here spoke about the event where those students came into Dr Asfat's surgery.  The event she was referring to actually happened on the 17th of September in 1976 which was a day when Dr Kissinger from America was 
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meant to come here and meet with John Vorster.  We from the SSRC launched a campaign against his visit to South Africa because we were saying that for him to come and meet with John Vorster when our people were being killed was very insensitive of him because clearly the issues did not seem to be related at all to what the Government had done to us.  We opposed that visit and we organised protests, but because of our experiences of marches in the streets in June, in August, you know, we decided that this time the protest must happen only within the school premises so that students would write their posters and put them on the fences of the schools.  In spite of that, what happened as Nomavenda indicated happened, the police still came, went into the school, shambokked students, shot at teachers, arrested students and continued to harass even as Kissinger came into this country.  
 I think that it is clearly an indication to us, I mean, even myself, I think at the worst of times I do try to keep a level head, you know, and not just get taken by emotions, but my own emotions had totally run out by then.  It is at that time that I then decided together with some of our colleagues that we have to find a way of going to get military training because we thought the only way the apartheid Government is going to understand, you know, is not really what we have been trying to do, but we had to find other ways to express ourselves.  Together with some of my colleagues we then actually connected with the ANC underground and we left the country.  We went to Swaziland.  Our aim was to go to get crash courses in military training which we knew that the ANC was providing in its forward bases like around Swaziland or Mozambique.  Our aim was to 
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eventually end up in Mozambique.  We left the country, we crossed the border on foot through Swaziland and then eventually ended up at the ANC, in fact, head quarters in Babane where we met with Moses Mabita at the time who was at the ANC mission there.  We met with Moses Mabita, but by then the ANC had decided that instead of continuing to have such courses outside, they were beginning to deploy the operatives inside the country and we were then able to, rather than go to Mozambique, because it was not my intention and certainly that of my colleagues to leave the country.  We wanted to see ourselves continuing inside the country and we had an interest in ensuring that the student movement remained intact.
 We then came back and it is after we came back that once again we were able to link up with the ANC underground operatives and carried on to do what we wanted to do, you know, and that happened.  It was some of the first operatives of Umkhonto we Sizwe that were sent in that we were able to connect with.  This was about October, November in 1976, but by that time we had also embarked on a number of campaigns like the Black Christmas Campaign of the time because we wanted that, given what our people have gone through, it made sense that Christmas of 1976 could not be celebrated in the same way as you celebrated Christmas' in previous years.  We had to pay respect to those of us who had been killed.  We had to pay respect and actually reflect on the problems of our community.  So this was what we did up till December 1976.  
 My detention happened on the 31st of December 1976 when, together with a number of others, there was a major police swoop that took place both in Soweto and in 
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Alexandria.  It happened that the ANC cells that I was linked with at that time were also, in fact, broken up on that day and we all four happened to meet each other when we landed at John Vorster Square in the morning of New Year, 1977.  It was clear that, you know, that part of ones activities had come to a stop.