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 transforms our understanding of what led to this crucial flashpoint of South Africa's history. Brown argues that far from there being a period of quiescence following the Sharpeville Massacre and its suppression, during which the opposition went underground, the decade preceding the Uprising was marked by experiments in resistance and attempts to develop new forms of politics that prepared the ground for it. Students at South Africa's segregated universities began to re-organize themselves as a political force; new ideas about race reinvigorated political thought; debates around confrontation shaped the development of new forms of protest. The protest then began to move off university campuses and onto the streets: through the independent actions of workers in Durban, and attempts by students to link their struggles with a broader 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.