The doctors and nurses on the front line of the Soweto uprising

A committee of Soweto high school students had carefully planned a protest on 16 June 1976 against the looming enforcement of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in the sciences and mathematics for black students, as well as against the thoroughly unequal “Bantu Education” system.

But 16 June’s protest became something very different from just one more protest in a long line of protests against the harsh apartheid system imposed by the National Party after 1948.

That day, the students’ march meant the deaths of hundreds and the grievous wounding of still more by the South African police.

In the years since 1976, it has become right to laud the bravery of those students, as their struggle is recorded in books and other first-person testimony, as well as immortalised in photographs, dramas, films, music and novels about the protests of the period. But we must also acknowledge the bravery of others, such as the physicians and nurses who rallied to aid waves of students carried to clinics and hospitals such as Baragwanath Hospital.

Now, 50 years later, one doctor wrote to me describing the dawning realisation of the significance of what was happening as news filtered into the hospital. Back then, there was no internet, social media or SMSs, and television and radio broadcasts were government controlled and news broadcasts accepted government obfuscations about the uprising.

As Dr David C Jacobs wrote: “It started off [as] a cold, [clear-sky] winter morning, a normal day, 16 June 1976. Teatime came and the world erupted! A call came through from [the] clinic that a well-known colleague to many in the paediatric department, Dr Melville Edelstein, had been killed by a group of protesting students. Shock – what was going on? Only as the morning drew on with the wailing of ambulances in the background did we begin to understand the impact of the event, which changed the lives of all and defined the role of Baragwanath Hospital [in] the ‘lives’ of many.”

The first fatality of the day, Edelstein had been a social worker with the Non-European Affairs Department of Johannesburg, and was admired for efforts supporting clinics, day care and early learning centres, among other projects. His car had apparently been hit by a volley of stones from individuals who, in the confusion of the day, probably thought he was a plainclothes policeman.

I spoke to doctors David and Susan Hall on the phone earlier this month, and they described Edelstein, noting: “As a social ­scientist, he [had] anticipated the social volcano’s bubbles in his studies on the social underclass, especially the young and impatient.”

A surgeon’s account

Later that fateful evening in 1976, I sat across a kitchen table from a young surgeon from Baragwanath. Slowly sipping coffee, he spoke about his day, with that thousand-yard stare – the look when one is beyond tears from what has been witnessed, like a soldier who has experienced so much combat over a concentrated period that they can no longer process their memories. The doctor explained that he was not sure of the exact number – he had lost count – but hundreds had been brought to the hospital that day.

Doctors David and Susan Hall were a paediatrician and a public health epidemiologist, respectively. The then young British doctors had been at the end of a three-year contract in South Africa.

They said: “Wednesday, 16 June 1976 began like any other day. It was the custom to begin morning rounds at 8am and stop for tea and tomato sandwiches at 10 o’clock precisely. It was a standing joke that the surgeons would stop mid-suture to get their sandwiches.

“As we ate our last sandwich, colleagues were shouting, ‘They’re killing the children – they’ve gone mad, they’re shooting the children!’ A rapidly growing, angry crowd gathered at the main entrance to the hospital and on the bridge across the road, held back by armed police… Helicopters thudded and hovered, firing into the crowd, and Saracen armoured personnel carriers as well as huge military-looking vehicles called ‘Hippos’ arrived.”

Helicopters over Baragwanath

On the phone, Susan Hall said the memory that has stayed with her for half a century was the sound of police helicopters swooping low over the hospital, then flying on to confront the students from the air. The Halls added: “Casualties, mainly children and young people with gunshot wounds, began to arrive at the hospital, in cars, bakkies and trucks, as well as ambulances.”

David added: “Sue worked in the township clinics on three days each week, but was in her clinic on the hospital campus on Wednesdays and was due to give a lecture to the junior nurses at 2pm. I was worried that she might meet a lot of hostility in the tense atmosphere. Nurses were gathering around the entrance to Casualty, raising clenched fists in the air and shouting ‘Amandla awethu!’

“During the rest of that day, hostile, yelling crowds grew in ever larger numbers in the area immediately outside the hospital gates just yards from Sue’s clinic – only separated by a wall. The helicopters also continued to hover over the clinic and police officers were … leaning out with rifles pointed downwards on the crowd, which was no longer just children but also many adults.

“There is something very demoralising about having a helicopter thudding just above your head and this memory returns even to this day when we hear a helicopter close by.”

Ironically, they added: “…The children’s clinics and medical wards where I [David] was working were unusually quiet that day, as parents did not dare risk bringing their sick children on the now hazardous journey to the hospital. The Casualty staff (accident and emergency) in contrast were working flat out dealing with gunshot wounds, some with the entry wounds on top of the head, as the police were firing down from helicopters… Appeals went out over the radio channels for blood donations and the people of Johannesburg responded.

“…The main road by which we normally came to Baragwanath was now too dangerous to use to go home. There was a rear exit from the hospital campus, reached by an overgrown gravel road across the veld that was normally closed, and staff were instructed to use this rather than the main entrance onto the Potchefstroom road, until the situation stabilised…

“It was the first time we had been in an armed conflict zone and while we were scared, we were also surprisingly elated – probably adrenalin-driven, but also because we sensed this day would go down in history and we were privileged to have been eye ­witnesses.”

Thinking back over these events, to me the circumstances at Baragwanath Hospital must have resembled one of those television dramas where hospital staff must cope simultaneously with a hazmat suit, armed shooters and a massive building fire catastrophe. The medical staff whose heroics were on display on 16 June had been forced to cope with a decade-and-a-half of just such emergencies.

What the children of Soweto marched for: accountability, democracy and a government that serves its people well

By Dr Malcolm Klein

When I was a young doctor at Baragwanath Hospital, I watched the Soweto uprising unfold. On 16 June 1976, I helped treat schoolchildren who had been shot by the police. I stood helpless beside the stretcher of Hastings Ndlovu, the first child to be shot that day. My neurosurgical colleague confirmed what I had expected: the wound was non-survivable. A few hours later, he was dead. Like many South Africans, I came away believing that apartheid had lost any moral right to govern.

In 1985, I emigrated to the US. I left carrying a hope: that SA would one day become a real democracy. The students who marched in Soweto did not risk their lives merely to exchange one form of unaccountable power for another. They marched because they believed a government answerable to its citizens would serve them far better than one answerable only to itself.

I have returned many times since, and those visits became my way of taking the measure of the country I had left behind. On earlier visits, I took pride in flying South African Airways. On later ones, I feel a sadness each time I board a Delta flight instead – not because Delta is the better airline, but because SAA is no longer an option.

I do not believe SAA was driven to the brink of collapse because a black-led government cannot run a great enterprise. It was driven there by a ruling party that treated the airline as spoils – a reward to hand out to its friends. The party gave senior jobs to loyal supporters and never made them answer for their failures.

The airline was not the only thing I watched decline. On those same visits, I lived through the blackouts that frustrated so many across the country. They called it load shedding, but the plain truth is that the lights were switched off because there was not enough electricity to go around. This was once a nation that exported power to its neighbours. Lately, however, the blackouts have largely disappeared.

SA has gone many months without scheduled outages, and Eskom has moved from chronic shortages to maintaining reserve capacity. Many factors contributed to that turnaround, but the most important was stewardship. Once the utility was managed as a public trust rather than treated as a political inheritance, the lights stayed on.

But the recovery is recent, and not guaranteed. Eskom itself warns that without new power plants built soon, the blackouts could return by the end of the decade. The lights are on today – but the lesson has to be relearnt every year.

The deeper lesson is that South Africa’s institutions were beaten by their own custodians. The planes were grounded and the lights went out for the same reason – not a scarcity of skill or money, but a state that mistook its institutions for spoils.

Whether this turnaround can also restore the public’s faith in the ANC is not yet clear. In 2024, the party lost its majority in Parliament for the first time since democracy began. The voters did to the ANC what the ANC had failed to do to its airline and its power company: they held it accountable.

The question now is whether the party that once treated institutions as prizes can do the harder work of rebuilding trust and accepting that power belongs to the electorate, not to itself. Fifty years ago, the children of Soweto marched and died for a government that would belong to its people. Will the ANC be that government, or merely the party that taught the country to demand one? That is the question that the heirs of that sacrifice must now answer at the ballot box. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.