Thirty years on .....

If you can ever say that one day could change a nation's history .... then for South Africa .... thirty years ago today may have been such a turning point. On June 16th 1976 thousands of schoolchildren in Soweto (a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg) staged a protest against being forced to learn Afrikaans, the shamefully poor standards of "Bantu" education and against the oppression of apartheid.

Tragically the protesting children were met with with the wrath and firepower of the South African Police - and the ensuing bloodbath spawned furious and violent unrest in townships across the country.

It was the first major protest since the 1950s and 60s when leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo had been imprisoned or exiled ..... after which the white National Party had ruled more or less unchecked with their policy of apartheid and white supremacy. But by the mid 1970s .... the spirit of revolution had again started to foment ....

One of the most iconic photographs of the past half century shows the brutality of the response to the uprising: 12 year old Hector Pieterson, one of the first children to be killed that day, lying dead in the arms of an anguished schoolboy with his sister running horrified alongside.

Mbuyisa Makhubo, the boy who picked Hector up, like many of the other protestors went into exile afterwards due to police harrassment. Some of these young people from the townships then went onto train as guerillas in other countries such as Angola and Zimbabwe to fight a covert war against the apartheid regime .... some fled to study in foreign universities and then came back in 1994 to lead the freed country .... others died in mysterious circumstances .... and Makhumbo like far too many others .... just disappeared - South Africa's lost generation remembered today on Youth Day.

The student protests of 1976 lit the spark of a freedom struggle .... that threw up many now famous leaders such as Steve Biko, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada ..... and culminated in the historic free and democratic elections in 1994, catapulting the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela into power.

The photograph of Hector Pieterson .... published across the world .... finally revealed the horrors of what was happening at the time in South Africa to a doubting international community. It resulted in sanctions, censure and widespread movements pressurising the apartheid regime to free its political prisoners and allow mutiracial elections. Hector Pieterson's sister, shown in the picture, has been widely quoted in the press here on the consequences of photo, the protest and his death: "I was a nobody, Hector was a nobody. What it proves is that you don't have to be famous to change the lives of other people."