My early years

On 12 September 1977 when Steve Biko died I was just a year and a couple of months old, crawling around in my nappies and there was no way I could have had any inkling of some of the significant events that were unfolding around me, including the brutal death in detention of someone as iconic as Biko.

When I started my primary school education in the early 1980s everything around me seemed quite okay; not even the occasional vicious whipping from some of my teachers could tamper with my general perception of life.

The early 1980s were characterised by heightened resistance against the Boers and one image of that era will remain forever fixed in my mind: that of armed white soldiers in brown uniforms standing guard at the entrance to our school.

These soldiers were such a regular feature that I was not really bothered by their presence until we had a discussion about them and one of my classmates wanted to know why they were stationed at our school gate.

One of the older learners ventured to explain that the soldiers were there to prevent the comrades from entering our schoolyard and disrupting our lessons.

His explanation didn't make much sense to me because it was not accompanied by a thorough explanation of the general situation and, looking back, I doubt it would have made much sense even if he had given a more elaborate explanation.

After quizzing him a bit, it occurred to us that these comrades were merely learners like us except that they were at high school and they wanted us to join something known then as ‘umzabalazo’ – the struggle.

At the time I was not particularly impressed with these ‘comrades’ because, in my mind, they were just a group of people who didn't like being in class. Therefore, in my mind, the soldiers were performing a noble act by preventing them from entering our schoolyard.

Looking back I realise that it was perhaps a good thing that I kept these thoughts to myself.