Where previous protests had opened up imaginative spaces in which to oppose the apartheid state, the Uprising in Soweto carved out a material space that was beyond the state's ability to control.

In the months following the events of 16 June 1976, Soweto ceased to be governed as an ordinary part of the apartheid system: the state was forced to reveal the violence lurking beneath its everyday operations. The township was isolated from the rest of the country, policed from the outside by the armed forces of the state. Inside, the SSRC and other groups sought to coordinate the masses of protesting students and other community members; in significant ways, these organisations replaced the state – organising the collection of garbage, coordinating public events, and acting as the legitimate alternative to the bankrupt Urban Bantu Council.

The attempts in Soweto to sustain insurgent actions over time suggested how a single protest could develop into more. This had significant consequences for the protests that were to come in the following years. In the years after the march it was impossible for the state, commentators within South Africa, and international observers to repeat the idea that the apartheid order was simply an alternate means of ordering a society – a local variation on the ordinary distribution of power.

The Uprising in Soweto exposed the apartheid order as a structure imposed on the world, designed to divide, and designed to render those divisions permanent. It operated through violence, brutality, and exclusion. By revealing the roots of this order, and its contingency, the Uprising exposed fissures in the existing political system, fissures between those who claimed to govern and those who were supposed to be governed. It showed that the black population of South Africa – treated for so long as subjects rather than as citizens – could no longer be forced to accept their disempowerment and dispossession. And it revealed the fact of that disempowerment and that dispossession to those who had previously chosen not to see it.

After the Uprising, South Africa was a changed place – the dissent of the majority from the apartheid social order was rendered visible, both to the members of that majority themselves as well as to the governing minority. Public protest became the principal means of conducting politics.