The Afrikaner-dominated government used the clause of the 1909 Union of South Africa Act that recognised only English and Dutch, the latter being replaced by Afrikaans in 1925, as official languages as its pretext.

[11] Punt Janson, the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education, was quoted as saying: "A Black man may be trained to work on a farm or in a factory.

A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Teboho "Tsietsi" Mashinini, proposed a meeting on 13 June 1976 to discuss what should be done.

The protest was planned by the Soweto Students' Representative Council's (SSRC) Action Committee,[17] with support from the wider Black Consciousness Movement.

The leader of the action committee asked the crowd not to provoke the police, and the march continued on another route and eventually ended up near Orlando High School.

Serving as Deputy Chief Welfare Officer, Edelstein instituted many projects aimed at assisting youth, disabled, poor, and marginalized communities within Soweto.

He was stoned to death by the mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming, "Beware Afrikaans is the most dangerous drug for our future".

[14][22] 1,500 armed police officers were deployed to Soweto on 17 June carrying weapons, including automatic rifles, stun guns, and carbines.

[26][27][28] The clashes occurred while the South African government was being forced to "transform" apartheid in international eyes towards a more "benign" form.

That attempt to showcase supposed South African "commitment" to self-determination backfired, however, since Transkei was internationally derided as a puppet state.

It would be 14 years before Nelson Mandela was released, but the state could never restore the relative peace and social stability of the early 1970s, as black resistance grew.

The day after the massacre, about 400 white students from the University of the Witwatersrand marched through Johannesburg's city centre in protest of the killing of children.

Students in Thembisa organised a successful and nonviolent solidarity march, but a similar protest held in Kagiso led to police stopping a group of participants, forcing them to retreat, and killing at least five people while reinforcements were awaited.

The University of Zululand's records and administration buildings were set ablaze, and 33 people died in incidents in Port Elizabeth in August.

[32] Kissinger and Vorster met again in Pretoria in September 1976, with students in Soweto and elsewhere protesting his visit and being fired on by police.

Residents said that the fighting started when local officials sought to evict tenants who had been refusing to pay their rents for two months as part of a mass boycott.

[34] The UDF leader Frank Chikane described the police actions "as if entering enemy territory, with guns blazing."

Minister of Information Louis Nel later came under fire for stating at a press conference, "Let there be no misunderstanding regarding the real issue at stake.

It is not the rental issue, it is not the presence of security forces in black residential areas, it is not certain remembrance days, it is not school programs.

On September 4, police filled a stadium with tear gas to stop a mass funeral for a number of the victims, swept through Soweto and broke up other services being held, including one at Regina Mundi Roman Catholic, where tear gas canisters were thrown into a bus containing mourners.

The photograph of Hector Pieterson's dead body, as captured by the photojournalist Sam Nzima, caused outrage and brought down international condemnation on the apartheid government.

[38] Many of the students who planned or joined the uprising, as well as other witnesses, took part, including the photographer Peter Magubane, the reporter Sophie Tema and Tim Wilson, the white doctor who pronounced Pieterson dead in Baragwanath Hospital.

In May 1999, it was rebroadcast by BBC Radio 4 as The Death of Apartheid with a fresh introduction that provided added historical context for a British audience by Anthony Sampson, a former editor of Drum magazine and the author of the authorised biography (1999) of Nelson Mandela.

Sampson linked extracts from the BBC Sound Archive that charted the long struggle against apartheid from the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 to the riots of 1976 and the murder of Steve Biko until Mandela's release from prison in 1990 and the future president's speech in which he acknowledged the debt owed by all black South Africans to the students who had given their lives in Soweto on 16 June 1976.