Younger students were not supposed to be part of the protest. It was like, ‘Now we are taking the streets of Soweto with a message.’” The night before the protest, Sithole ironed her school uniform and packed her school bag with placards, while her younger brother, 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, looked on enviously. “We were a little bit scared, you know, but we felt free already. For a young woman caught up in the heady excitement of drafting slogans, writing signboards and practicing revolutionary songs, it was an immense rush. So Sithole and an estimated 20,000 other students from Soweto’s high schools decided, in secret, to hold a protest. “The very same subject that you are struggling with in English, we are going to do them in Afrikaans? This doesn’t make sense.” “Obviously physical science on its own is very difficult,” remembers Sithole, now 65. Not only was Afrikaans the language of their colonial oppressors-Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch spoken by South Africa’s first European settlers-she was already having a hard time understanding much of her subject matter. To 15-year-old Antoinette Sithole, it was a bombshell. That all changed when the government decreed that instead of learning in English, as most black children were, they would be taught in Afrikaans. Read More: See the Photos That Gave Americans Their First Glimpse of Apartheid in 1950
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