The massive eruption of the youth revolt in the township of Soweto near Johannesburg on 16 June 1976 sent shockwaves across the length and breadth of South Africa. Those tremors were felt in many other townships and rural villages almost instantly and in the years that followed until 1994. It was a major turning point as black youngsters took leadership at the forefront of popular resistance against the apartheid state. After 1976, schools, particularly in urban areas on the Witwatersrand, were turned into battlegrounds from which students repeatedly launched offensives against gutter education, authoritarianism and the apartheid system as a whole. While the shockwaves of the 1976 Soweto students’ uprising were felt in the countryside, it was only really in the period from the mid-1980s that the urban youth culture of resistance – what Colin Bundy (1987) labelled ‘generational consciousness’ – became widely entrenched among the rural youth as well. As a result of the social and historical processes that influenced them, rural youth became self-assertive and aware of themselves as a separate social category with a common identity, capable of changing the way their communities operated.

Many books and scholarly articles have been written about youth uprisings in the country but most of these tend to focus on Soweto and other townships on the Witwatersrand, where most of the popular resistance against apartheid was concentrated, with little consideration being given to the countryside. There are two main reasons why very little has been written about the unfolding of the Soweto Uprising in the South African countryside in general, and in the northern parts of the country in particular. The first reason has to do with researchers’ preoccupation with developments in towns, thanks to the relative ease of access to information and shortness of distance to research sites in urban areas. As a result, they have lacked meaningful contact with the countryside or knowledge of issues affecting rural communities. The second reason concerns the forms of struggles and resistance in the countryside that were invariably more low-key and incomplete and not as dramatic or as visible as those unfolding in the urban townships.