On 16 June 1976, school students in the township of Soweto began to protest against the apartheid regime. The police set dogs upon them and opened fire. At least 176 were killed, sparking months of unrest and rebellion across the country. On the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, Sazi Bongwe returns to an iconic photograph from the massacre.

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Masana Samuel “Sam” Nzima was born in 1934, in Lilydale, a small village in what was then the Northern Transvaal and is now the province of Mpumalanga. He grew up on the farm where his father worked and his family lived. His father worked the land but did not own it: in a black rural community, a white farmer made his bread by black labour.

At school, Nzima marvelled as his teacher made pictures come out of a box. At once, he bought a Kodak Brownie; during school holidays, he travelled to Kruger National Park and charged tourists to take their portraits. At age 12, he was put to work on the farm, but after nine months he ran away to Johannesburg. There, he worked as a gardener and a waiter, until he freelanced his way to a full-time photojournalist job at The World in 1968. Eight years later, on 16 June, he took the photograph that proclaimed the true character of the apartheid regime to the world. He would spend decades struggling against various newspapers to own the photograph. Only 22 years after the Soweto Uprising would Nzima obtain the copyright.

I cannot say when I first saw the photo, and I cannot count how many times I’ve seen it. In my memory it is like a landmark, always there in the distance – or perhaps it is more like the landscape, an indelible feature of the distance itself. I know it well: the diagonal lines perfectly splitting the background into three gradations of light and dark. Against that background, the terrible verticality of the two upright figures, running. Lying across them, the cruel horizontal of the young boy, lifeless and yet not weightless. I know their names: Hector Pieterson, shot dead at age 12; Antoinette Sithole, his sister, afraid to look, not knowing where to look; Mbuyisa Makhubo, weary, realising, resolute, holding Hector in his hands. I know their hands: Mbuyisa’s right hand tightly clutching Hector’s left leg; Hector’s two hands, hanging loosely and downwards, towards the earth; and Antoinette’s right hand, raised upwards, combining with the awful expression on her face to say: this is unbearable.

The meaning of the photo has changed as I have, as the country around me has. As a child, I saw it in countless history textbooks; each black child, born free, was meant to see Hector Pieterson as what they might have been had history not happened. A 176 school children were shot dead by the apartheid police for protesting the inferior ‘Bantu’ education they were receiving – an education preparing them for nothing beyond manual labour. Now, here, in our classrooms, reading and writing, equal and free, we were to see ourselves as the fruits of those students’ civic labour. It was a perfect story – perfect for a picture book but not perhaps for the historical chronicle we were still living. Not by state law, but by the more iron laws of capital and class, the facts of educational impoverishment are still everywhere to see in South Africa.

So are the very facts and politics of language that lit the Soweto Uprising’s fuse. Already, come the 1970s, black students were being made to learn in a language that was not theirs. Black students left their Bantu languages, their mother tongues, at home to study in English; most of them adopted names that were not their own; Rolihlala Mandela was given the English name Nelson by a teacher on his first day of school. Then, in 1974, the apartheid regime added the insult of a decree instituting Afrikaans as the medium of instruction alongside English. Not content with dispossessing black South Africans of their land, the apartheid regime sought to dispossess them of their voice – of their very ability to learn how to use their voice. Afrikaans, so to speak, fell; but today it remains true that the black South African who is born must speak English to do or own anything in his country. Questions of land expropriation linger in South Africa; so too do questions of the language in which the future of the country will be expressed.

Every year when 16 June comes around, Nzima’s image is circulated. Discontented South Africans use the photograph to point to each new injustice, suggesting we have not come as far as we would have liked. The photo has become, in itself, a protest; its fate in South Africa (and elsewhere) is like that of Picasso’s Guernica – a painting with which Nzima’s photograph shares an uncanny resemblance.

Every week Guernica names a new atrocity, accuses a new war criminal. Guernica stopped belonging to Picasso a long time ago. It belongs to the world in common; by means of it, we come to know how terrible our world remains. And it is the same with Nzima’s photo. The continuing plight of poor black South Africans; the many post-apartheid massacres tied to the mining industry, from Marikana to Stilfontein; the quieter deaths in pit latrines or through curable diseases – Nzima’s photograph condemns them. Even 50 years later, South Africans cannot put Nzima’s photograph behind them – it is theirs, it belongs to them.