Hector Pieterson

Zolile Hector Pieterson was born on the nineteenth of August 1963 in Orlando West, Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in the crowded, resilient community of the township under the apartheid state, and as a boy he attended Phefeni Junior Secondary School. He was twelve years old in the winter of 1976.

On the morning of the sixteenth of June 1976, thousands of Soweto schoolchildren marched in peaceful protest against a government decree forcing them to be taught in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors. When police opened fire on the unarmed students near Vilakazi Street, Hector was struck by a bullet. A fellow student, eighteen-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubo, lifted the dying child into his arms and ran, with Hector's sister Antoinette Sithole running alongside them in anguish.

In that instant the photographer Sam Nzima captured an image that would travel around the world: a broken boy carried through the smoke, a sister's grief beside him. Published across the globe, the photograph pierced the silence surrounding apartheid and became one of the defining images of the twentieth century, hardening international resolve against the regime. Though another child, Hastings Ndlovu, was shot before him, it was Hector's face that the world came to know.

His death helped turn a nation's mourning into a movement. The anniversary of the uprising is now honored each year in South Africa as Youth Day, and the Hector Pieterson Museum, opened in 2002 near where he fell, keeps his memory alive. May Hector Pieterson be forever honored — a child whose brief life awakened the conscience of the world.