The office of the Chair of Chairs and team of chairpersons of committees in the Council of the City of Johannesburg honoured unsung heroes as part of Nelson Mandela month.
The first phase of the event had a lot of activities like gardening and painting at the Alexandra Disability Movement Centre on Friday, 22 July 2022, at Alexandra in Region E.
“Gardening teaches us to do things for ourselves, to feed ourselves,” said the City of Johannesburg’s Chair of Chairs Cllr Colleen Makhubele.
The idea was to instill this in the little children, in the youth and the elderly, she said.
“Tata Nelson Mandela played his part and other struggle activists played their part. We would be expecting too much after what people like mama Antoinette Sithole, Hector Pieterson’s sister, have done and what they have gone through to advise or stand up again to fight our battles in this generation. The question remains, what are we going to do now?” said Makhubele.
Sithole addressed the second phase of the gathering. She related the 1976 Soweto students uprising until the painful moment where she realised that her brother was injured in the subsequent police shooting of unarmed protesters. Pieterson was certified dead by a doctor at the local clinic.
“All those who died that day, did not die in vain. As people, we managed to take out the good from the bad, to live by today, to shape ourselves and our country,” Sithole said in closing.
Seth Mazibuko, another Soweto Uprising activist, was the last speaker. He got arrested at the age of 16 and was sent to Robben Island where he spent 18 months in solitary confinement.
“What I regret most on that day is having led students out of their classrooms only to be killed by the police. It hurts the most now that on June 16, you have young people getting to the stadium, getting to decks to jive over death and seeing them in full school uniform drunk,” lamented Mazibuko.
He urged the youth and everyone to gather stones for building this beautiful country.
The City honoured all invitees for their contribution and for being “Uncelebrated Heroes”.
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