The Road to Soweto ─ Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976

This revisionary account of the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and the decade preceding it both transforms our understanding of this crucial flashpoint of South Africa's history and creates a more evolutionary, historical narrative for the overthrow of apartheid. It argues that the suppression of opposition movements and imprisonment of their leaders following the Sharpeville massacre did not lead to a period of "quiescence" in which activists retreated into private acts of dissent and opposition went underground. Rather, these years were marked by experiments in resistance and attempts to develop new forms of politics that prepared the ground for the uprising in Soweto, introducing new modes of organization, new models of protest, and new ideas of resistance, identity and political ideology to a generation of activists. The book begins by showing how students at South Africa's segregated universities began to re-organize themselves as a political force; how new ideas about race reinvigorated political thought; and how debates around confrontation shaped the development of new forms of protest. Brown then builds upon this narrative to show how protest began to move off university campuses and onto the streets: through the independent actions of workers in Durban, and then through attempts by students to link their struggles with a broader political agenda. These actions made protest public once again, and helped establish the patterns of popular action and state response that would come to shape the events in Soweto on 16 June 1976. Julian Brown is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of South Africa's Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics in South Africa (Zed, 2015).BR >