Rise ’76: Commemorating the legacy of the June 16th tragedy

Title: Rise ’76: The Story of June 16th

Director: Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni

Starring: Deon Lotz, Alex Sono, Ben Albertyn, Botlhale Mahlangu, Zilungile Mbombo, Mfuneli Ntumbuka, Sbuja Dywili

Venue: Baxter Theatre until 30 May 

Rating: ★★★★☆

Telling factual stories of the past usually comes with its fair share of creative liberties but for the most part this play about the apartheid police’s murder of school children on 16 June 1976 stays on track.

The synopsis explains this production “vividly captures the growing tension between the Department of Bantu Education, the South African police and a generation of learners pushed to their limits. What begins as a localised dispute unfolds into a tragic and historic turning point that reshaped the nation.”

This year marks 50 years since the tragedy — hundreds of school children were killed in Soweto and the photo of a deceased Hector Pieterson carried in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubo with Hector’s sister Antoinette Sithole beside him shocked the world. Hector was 12.

Photographer Sam Nzima took the photo and his testimony is among those brought to life in this play. Stories of parents who lost their children, some as young as four years old, are presented too.

The play mentions anti-apartheid icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as having dropped some of the murdered children off at a Soweto hospital. 

On stage, doctors talk about hundreds of bodies and bullet wounds. In the hospital, the audience is invited to imagine what a mother told a doctor when she went looking for her murdered child.

Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni, who wrote and directed this play, said she interviewed 40 people and dug into archives to articulate this story.

“With an event of this magnitude, thousands of details can easily fall through the cracks. So, with this play, I’ve only picked up what I think are only a couple of crumbs,” she said.

“To explore this, the play adopts a documentary style storytelling lens that zooms into the lesser-explored domestic moments — like listening in on a teaching staff meeting as they discover all the textbooks are in Afrikaans, catching a glimpse into a secret student logistics meeting or witnessing someone getting arrested before they could even take their morning bath.”

While this is a well-known story, the script does not fall into any stereotypical traps. The characters are believable as the actors do not overplay any tears and their pauses come off at the right time.

I attended a matinee performance and was quietly pleased that a number of teenagers of different races were in the audience. The Tik-Tok generation got lit.

There are stories about ourselves that we retell because we do not want to forget our past. We tell these stories so the future can know about it too.

‘Rise ’76: The Story of June 16th’ makes its next stop at The Market Theatre’s Mannie Manim stage from 5 to 28 June.