‘A New Black Militancy’ — Before and after the Soweto Uprising

Abstract

On 16 June 1976, the Guardian published an open letter from Reverend Desmond Tutu to the South African Prime Minister John Vorster. It had previously been published in the South African newspaper the Sunday Tribune. Vorster had declined to reply in public, instead accusing Tutu of making propaganda. In the article Tutu stated that he was writing ‘as one who is a member of a race that has known what it has meant in frustrations and hurts, in agony and humiliation, to be a subject people’. After naming a number of concrete injustices that black people were suffering in South Africa, Tutu continued:

How long can a people, do you think, bear such blatant injustice and suffering? Much of the White community by and large, with all its prosperity, its privilege, its beautiful homes, its servants, its leisure, is hagridden by a fear and a sense of insecurity. And this will continue to be the case until South Africans of all races are free … I am writing to you sir, because I have a growing nightmarish fear that unless something drastic is done very soon bloodshed and violence is going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably.