Cindy Nzaliwani - South Africa
Change Through Strikes
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Yes. There's one incident that happened. It's a massacre in a way in 1976. I was young at the time. I was very small because I was only started school. As the years grow up, as the years go on I know I was reading in the papers and that there are so many students that died in 1976 because of the government that I was telling you that was bad. So, like I'm Black. I can't learn all my studies in Afrikaans [a language derived from Dutch colonialists]. I had to get my language somewhere and it has to be a different language. So they wanted the students, the Black students to learn in Afrikaans, each and every study; from Maths, Afrikaans, whatever. There is going to be Afrikaans. So the students said “No ways, we can't take that! If it's gonna be like that then we are going to go on strike!” Then all the children came out on the road; they were striking. And the government I was telling you about, the previous government, the Apartheid government, they shoot the children. Not that they were warning them, like they were warning us with rubber bullets. They were shooting them to death and there's this particular student, Hector Pieterson, that died that day. And yeah, we still like remember those children because they were standing for their right. They had to stand up because they can't learn in Afrikaans.
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