Why Hector Pieterson?

Today it is widely known that Hector Pieterson was not the first child killed on June 16 1976. The first to die was Hastings Ndlovu. So why do we memorialise Hector Pieterson and not Hastings Ndlovu?

A primary reason is because Hector Pieterson’s death was captured by photographer Sam Nzima. The photograph depicts Hector Pieterson being carried by an older boy with his sister running alongside. This famous photograph was plastered on newspaper front pages globally, bringing much attention to the actions of the police and the plight of the school children in Soweto. Today, this image has become an icon, an instrument of collective history and memory.

In the aftermath of the violence, a mass burial was planned for the dead. An application to hold a mass burial was made to the Johannesburg Chief Magistrate which was denied. Further attempts to list all the dead were foiled by the police as the bereaved families were denied access to the bodies of the dead.

A decision was made to hold a symbolic funeral using Hector Pieterson’s funeral as a symbol for all those who lost their lives during the Soweto uprisings of 1976.

Morris Isaacson High School Route

One of the main routes of the 1976 Soweto Uprisings from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary School in Orlando West.

How to participate

There are plenty ways to participate in soweto uprisings . com. Here are a few:

• If you feel the map's missing a location which, really, should be on there, contact Ismail or Babak.
• You can leave a comment on any of the locations from one of the routes by clicking on the marker for the particular location you want to comment on. One of the tabs is called 'Comments'. Go there.
• You can submit pictures for any of the existing locations by uploading them to Flickr, joining the soweto uprisings group at Flickr and tagging them accordingly. What to tag your pictures with, you can find out by clicking on the '?' tab for any location.
• For certain locations, you can have your blog entries be listed in relation to the particular locations. Your blog must be indexed by Google blogsearch and satisfy the search criteria as mentioned on the '?' tab.
  
• If you have content, related to the Soweto uprisings which you feel fits better directly on this website as compared to your own blog, or if you don't have the ability or facility to maintain your own blog, contact Ismail or Babak.
• If you're a website owner located in or around Soweto, you can geotag your website. Check out GeoURL for details. When tagged correctly, we'll pick up your website automatically.

So you see, many possibilities. Just choose one.

Credo Mutwa interviews

Over on YouTube, user fuzynugs has uploaded a whole series of interviews by David Icke, of Credo Mutwa.

Here's just one:



Check out this page for a whole list of them.

Press

Contact Ismail or Babak through the links to their profiles in the right column.

Credits

Thanks to all involved:

Antonnete Sithole, by re-living the day's events, helped with identifying her route, from Tshesele High School to Phefeni senior secondary school.

Mphafi Mphafi, for identifying the Morris Isaacson High School Route. Mphafi now works with the June 16th Foundation and at the time chairman of the South African students movement (from 1974 to 1975). He is currently involved with the Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) in formalising the Soweto township sidewalks and roads.

Oupa Maloto, from the June 16th Foundation, was instrumental in identifying meeting places in central western Jabavu.

Ali Hlongwane, for identifying the Madibane High route and Junior secondary school routes in Diepkloof. As well as the Avalon Memorial Route in Chiawelo.

ASM architects and urban designers, for managing the Hector Pieterson Research Project and for facilitating architectural scale drawings of the routes of the uprisings. In particular, S'phelele Nxumalo, Lorenzo Nassimbeni and Liale Francis.

Ismail Farouk - The primary researcher who talked to all the individual contributors and collected all the content on Soweto uprisings . com.

Babak Fakhamzadeh created the online environment. In doing so, he used the Flickr API, the Google Maps API, the Geo-names webservice, the GeoURL webfeed, the tabber script from Barelyfitz designs, the Lightbox JS v2.0 script by Lokesh Dhakar, the Rich HTML Balloon Tooltip code listed on Dynamic Drive, some additional javascript by Shawn Olson and even some of his own code.
The cloud tags is done by ZoomClouds, the backend of soweto uprisings . com uses the excellent tableeditor by 2enetworx.

Who's behind soweto uprisings . com

soweto uprisings . com is presented by The Hector Pieterson Research Project and is a creation of Ismail Farouk and Babak Fakhamzadeh.

Ali Hlongwane, chief curator at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum initiated the research project which lead to the creation of soweto uprisings . com.

Ismail Farouk is an urban geographer and an artistic centipede. On July 29th 2006, he had a one day exhibition called 'sometimes a fire' at the Parking Gallery in Johannesburg. Earlier, he tried to make money selling rocks and sand.

Ismail identified and collected the information which is available on soweto uprisings . com. He can be reached through his website.

Babak Fakhamzadeh is an Iranian web developer from the Netherlands with a keen interest in art. Back in 2003, he considered selling rocks from Mongolia.

Babak created the interactive environment which is soweto uprisings . com. He can be reached through his website.