On 16 June 1976, students from secondary schools across Soweto marched through the township towards the Orlando Stadium. They planned a peaceful procession and gathering to demonstrate their opposition to the government's plan to change the medium of instruction in their schools from English to Afrikaans. Many of the students believed that this would be a carnivalesque occasion, filled with laughter and the reversal of social norms, with one student remembering that he had thought that, on the day, ‘female students will wear our trousers or their fathers’ trousers and we will wear our sisters’ dresses.’

This was not to be.

In the early hours of the morning, the South African Police began to gather at street corners scattered along the students’ route. From about 08h00 they began to challenge isolated groups of students. These early incidents gave rise to rumours of police violence, which ran through Soweto, and then erupted into fact at 11h00 outside the Orlando West High School.

Here, a group of between thirty and fifty policemen confronted a large crowd of students. The students had been halted in their march, and they were standing in place. They were singing, whistling at the police and brandishing placards. In a moment, though, this changed. In the words of Sophie Tema, a journalist at the scene: ‘a White policeman hurled what seemed to be a teargas shell – which released a cloud of smoke and gas – into the crowd … [I saw] a White policeman pull out his revolver, point it, and fire it. As soon as the shot was fired other policemen also began firing.’ The shots sped into the crowd, where they killed two youths. Tema saw ‘a young boy … fall with a bullet wound’. She reported: ‘He had a bloody froth on his lips and he seemed to be seriously hurt so I took him to the … clinic in a press car but he was dead when we arrived.’

The child's name was Hector Pieterson, and his image was flashed across the world, becoming an emblem of the apartheid state's brutality and cruelty. But his was not the only death that day.