Tara Sattar
The photo was taken by a photojournalist back in the time when the school kids came down to the streets to protest “Apartheid”. The story that comes with it is horrifying and changed the view of the world.
Antoinette Sithole, now 65, tells the story of that frightful day to TIME.
In Soweto, a small city located just outside Johannesburg, the black children hardly ever encountered the minority white people. None of the members of the exclusive black community would come across the whites who would treat them like something lesser than humans.
The parents would still, however, complain that the white people treated their children badly or in condescending manner.
All these lack of interactions changed when the government decided that the school going children would be taught in Afrikaan language instead of English. This made no sense to the students as they found Afrikaan to be a difficult language. Also, they despised it because the language belonged to their colonial oppressors.
In order to protest this move, the school children took to the street. Antoinette Sithole remembers ironing her uniform and packing her bag with the placards of protest. Her 13-year-old brother was sitting by her watching her with envy. He was too young and therefore not allowed to go to participate.
On the morning of the protest, the students demonstrated and one of the members leaked the news to the media so that there would be a guaranteed coverage of the protest. It was then that photojournalist Sam Nzima was sent to the rally to take photographs of the ongoing protest.
While the protest was on, the police threw teargas at the crowd to disperse them. The students dispersed and flung around the places, hiding by entering other people’s houses. The “White Apartheid Police” started firing shots at them.
During those times, rubber bullets were not easily available, so the ammunitions were live. If you were fired on, you were dead.
Amidst the protest, Sithole spotted her brother across the street. She waved at him and signed that they will get home soon. He smiled back.
The police kept firing and suddenly the swarm moved away and Sithole saw a boy fall. It was her brother. She found it difficult to believe as he was with her just then and now he was shot. Before she could figure out what was happening, she saw a man pick him up and run. She ran along with him. She kept on asking who he was and where was he taking him when the man showed her that the boy had been shot and he was rushing him to a hospital. Sithole noticed blood oozing out of her brother’s mouth.
The man who tried to save the 13-year-old shot boy was an 18-year-old Mbuiysa Makhubo. He had already finished school by then and so wasn’t part of the protest but he went to help anyway. “They are killing the kids”, he said.
By the time Makhubo tried to get the 13-year-old Hector Pieterson on to a car, it was too late. He was already dead. Sithole felt the ache eat her away, but she knew she wasn’t the only one who lost someone that day.
During the whole incident, Sam Nzima, the photojournalist took six photos. By the was aware that the police would snatch away his roll so he put the role away in his pocket and started with a fresh one.
In his roll were a series of photos starting from the boy being shot to being carried to the car. When he took the photos back to “The World”, the newspaper he worked in, they sat a meeting to decide whether to run the photos.
However, they did. They chose the photo where Makhubo was carrying the boy and Sithole was running beside him. They ran the oicture in the front page. And the whole came down on ‘Apatheid’ and decided that it cou7ld no longer be ignored.
However world changing that photo was, the aftermath was horrible.
The police threatened Nzima with “shoot at sight” if he was ever seen taking photographs again. The government shut down “The World” newspaper and raided their office. It is believed that all the negatives of Nzima’s photographs were destroyed.
Makhubo, the savior, couldn’t bear to live with the failure and walked away in depression causing his family to never celebrate Christmas again. He is said to have walked all the way to Botswana and sometimes write his family from there.
Nzima, now 61 sits in a chair, seeing through the lens of his camera how that photo destroyed his career but brought one of the biggest changes to the world.