Les Payne

June 15, 2010

At about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 16th, South Africa should silence the raucous fan-noise at the World Cup and pay homage to the blood-stained shroud of Hector Pietersen.

On the morning of that day of protest 34 years ago, as Soweto students massed in an open field—an agitated policeman fired a single shot that sent 13-year old Pieterson sprawling in his own blood. He was in the book of martyrs before he hit the ground.

As his buddy in overalls went screaming down the field with Pieterson’s body, the children of Soweto had marked the point of no return for apartheid. Spearheaded by the Boers, the racist white minority had locked away Nelson Mandela and his comrades for a dozen years; and thus they felt the black majority could be suppressed for a thousand years.

But on June 16th, some 20,000 unarmed students stepped forth to challenge the Europeans who stole their land and looted its mineral wealth. Initially, they protested the use of the Boers’ narrow, Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. The killing of Pieterson ignited the Soweto Uprising that brought in adults and targeted the entire superstructure of racist apartheid.

The Boers exacted a terrible toll in blood as police gunned down hundreds of unarmed African men, women and children who dared rise up against tyranny and barbarism. Blood diamonds, minerals and Krugerrands bought needed U.S. technology and President Reagan—the worst Chief Executive in modern times—offered the racist regime complete White House support under a policy of “constructive engagement.”

Heroic American students of that era broke with the Reagan Administration and pressured Congress into overriding a White House veto and imposing stiff sanctions against South Africa .

Sports—and this is where the 2010 World Cup comes in-- dealt another blow to the solar plexus of this apartheid republic, as decent people around the world forced their governments to alienate this South African assault on all humanity. The national rugby team, the sporting pride of the insufferable Boers, was banned from international competition. And starting in 1964, racist republic of South Africa was banned from all Olympics games. 

Destabilized by the revolt at home and going bankrupt under tough international sanction, the apartheid regime was forced to yield. Nelson Mandela and fellow political prisoners were released; their party, the African National Congress, was un-banned and the 350-odd pieces of legislation mandating total separation of the races were stricken from the books.

On the sports front, South Africa , in exchange, was allowed to return to the Olympics in 1992; and its rugby teams once again played overseas. As the Founding Father of the new South Africa , Mandela personified the stamp of dignity granted not only to his South African administration but also to its athletes on the global playing fields.

Thus, the absence of the 91-year old Mandela from the opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup makes a poetic, if inadvertent statement about the unfinished business of the new South Africa . The majority has gained political authority, true enough, but blacks are quite a ways off from wresting economic independence from the entrenched, settler colony continuing to exploit and hoard the nation’s mineral wealth.

The founding father of the New South Africa, who stepped down as president a decade ago, missed the ceremony as he mourned the death of a 13-year old grandchild killed in an automobile accident. It is a mark of progress that the blood of such youngsters is no longer the price Africans must pay for the liberation of their country.

This price--of political freedom at least--was paid in full by the revolt of the people. It started that fateful morning at 10:30 a.m.; when Hector Pieterson made his way through the teargas wafting over that Soweto field and stood up to face the guns of the police even as they began to flash and roar.

Without Hector Pieterson the world may never have come to know Nelson Mandela; without them both South Africa most assuredly would not be hosting the 2010 World Cup.