June 16, the Call of Islam, and the many rivers of liberation

Fifty years after the Soweto Uprising, Adli Yacubi reflects on how June 16 shaped a generation of Muslim activists, the emergence of the Call of Islam, and the enduring struggle for justice and human dignity.

By ADLI YACUBI

We grew up in the aftermath

By the time we came into political consciousness in the 1980s, June 16 was already part of the air.

Not history.

Air.

In the townships, in the schools, in the Friday khutbahs that suddenly became more dangerous, in student meetings, in the silence of parents who feared detention, banning orders, police raids and funerals that could turn political before the janazah even reached the maqbara.

We were younger than the generation of Hector Pieterson.

But we grew up in the aftershock of Soweto.

In Primrose Park, in Manenberg, in Athlone, and across the Cape Flats generally, June 16 had already travelled ahead of us. It had entered the political vocabulary of the country. Even those who wanted ‘peace’ now spoke differently. The apartheid state had exposed itself too openly. Children had been shot in the streets. After that, neutrality became harder to perform.

For Muslim youth especially, the question became unavoidable:

What does Islam mean in a country like this?

Not in theory.

Here.

Under apartheid.

That question did not produce one answer.

Some moved towards Black Consciousness traditions. Some entered worker formations and civic struggles. Some were drawn into Islamic political movements such as Qibla. Others found a home in the broad democratic culture emerging through civic organisations, trade unions, the United Democratic Front (UDF), and formations like the Call of Islam. Many moved between these spaces as the struggle intensified.

But all of us, in one way or another, were standing in the long shadow of June 1976.

June was never only about Afrikaans

To reduce June 16 to a protest against Afrikaans is to misunderstand the depth of what erupted in 1976.

The issue was never merely linguistic.

The issue was power.

The issue was dignity.

The issue was who had the right to think, to speak, to dream, and to belong fully in the land of their birth.

Bantu Education was not simply a broken schooling system. It was an instrument designed to produce obedience instead of imagination. Submission instead of citizenship. Labourers instead of free human beings.

And yet there is another irony history sometimes forgets.

Afrikaans itself was not the enemy.

In the Cape especially, Afrikaans also carried the memory of slaves, workers, labourers and imams. Long before the apartheid state tried to weaponise the language politically, Cape Muslims had already written Afrikaans in Arabic script. The language carried du‘ā, madrasah notes, family letters, recipes, poems and fragments of survival.

The political language of the 1980s was changing too. In the Cape especially, pamphlets, speeches and public meetings moved easily between English and Afrikaaps, between Quranic references and street language, between the vocabulary of resistance and the rhythms of ordinary people. Politics no longer sounded distant or academic. It sounded like the townships themselves.

Languages themselves are not innocent or guilty.

Power is.

The children of 1976 understood this instinctively. Even if they did not yet possess the vocabulary to articulate it fully, they recognised humiliation when they encountered it. They recognised domination when it entered the classroom disguised as education.

And they refused it.

The mosque enters history

By the 1980s, the aftershocks of June 16 had spread into nearly every corner of South African life.

Mosques increasingly became spaces not only of prayer but of political discussion, solidarity and moral witness. Muslim activists entered worker struggles, student organisations, civic movements and interfaith formations. Questions of race, justice, gender and economic inequality entered Muslim discourse with a new urgency.

For many, Islam could no longer remain confined to ritual while the country burned.

The Call of Islam emerged within this atmosphere.

Like many formations of the period, it was shaped by the energy and tensions of the 1980s: the growth of mass democratic politics, the influence of the UDF, the rise of civic resistance, worker struggles, youth activism and international liberation movements. But it also emerged from distinctly Muslim questions:

How should Muslims respond to oppression?

Could faith remain silent before apartheid?

What did justice require from believers living inside a racial state?

The answers were not always the same. There were debates, disagreements and different ideological tendencies within Muslim political life itself. Yet what June 16 produced, unmistakably, was a generation unwilling to separate Islam from the condition of the oppressed.

Many rivers of liberation

One of the mistakes we make today is to remember the struggle as if it moved through one channel only.

It did not.

South African liberation politics was crowded, argumentative, fragmented, overlapping and alive. There were Black Consciousness formations, trade union traditions, underground movements, church networks, women’s organisations, student structures, Islamic movements, civic associations and broad-front democratic formations. Some cooperated closely. Others distrusted one another deeply.

Yet despite these differences, people found ways to move together against apartheid.

That was one of the moral achievements of the period.

The broad-front traditions of the 1980s understood something important: apartheid did not only segregate people physically. It fragmented them psychologically and socially. Resistance therefore also required building difficult solidarities across race, class, religion and ideology.

This did not mean everyone agreed.

Far from it.

But many recognised that no single organisation, ideology or community could defeat apartheid alone.

There were many rivers flowing towards liberation.

Women also walked into the struggle

Another quiet transformation of that generation was the changing role of women within Muslim political life.

Women were no longer expected to remain invisible while history unfolded around them. Muslim women organised, marched, debated, wrote, mobilised communities and entered leadership spaces that had often been restricted to men.

This shift was not smooth.

Patriarchies did not disappear because activists wished them away. Religious conservatism frequently collided with democratic aspirations. Yet the political atmosphere after June 16 forced difficult conversations into the open.

The struggle itself changed people.

Not completely.

But significantly.

What happened to the dream?

Fifty years later, South Africa remains wounded.

Political freedom did not automatically produce economic justice. Wealth remains concentrated. Schools remain unequal. Entire communities continue to live with unemployment, violence and abandonment.

And there are other heartbreaks too.

The rise of xenophobia.

The normalisation of corruption.

The exhaustion of public trust.

The shrinking moral imagination of political leadership.

Sometimes one wonders what the children of 1976 would recognise in the country that emerged from their sacrifice.

And yet despair is too easy.

The generation of June teaches something more demanding than cynicism.

It teaches endurance.

June is not finished with us

We should be careful not to turn June 16 into ritual nostalgia.

The children of Soweto were not asking to become museum pieces.

They were asking future generations to continue the struggle for human dignity in their own time.

That amanah remains with us.

Each generation must answer for the injustices of its own age. For some, that may mean confronting racism. For others, economic inequality, xenophobia, patriarchy, state violence or the abandonment of the poor.

The forms change.

The moral question does not.

Will we stand with the oppressed?

Or will we slowly learn to accommodate oppression because it has become familiar?

June 16 does not ask us to repeat old slogans mechanically.

It asks whether we still possess the courage to disturb injustice when it becomes normalised.

Whether we still possess the imagination to build solidarity across difference.

Whether we still remember that liberation was always larger than ourselves.

The children of June carried many dreams into the future.

Some were fulfilled.

Some were betrayed.

Some are still waiting for us.

Adli Yacubi is a South African writer and former anti-apartheid activist whose work explores memory, Islam, liberation history and Cape Muslim life. A founding member of the Call of Islam in the 1980s, he writes on the intersections of faith, justice, spirituality and resistance in South Africa. He is the author of Punching Above Its Weight: The Story of the Call of Islam and currently writes the ‘Cape Memoir & Resistance’ series.