Hector Pieterson

Hector Zolile Pieterson was born in Orlando West, Soweto, South Africa, on the nineteenth of August 1964. He attended Phomolong Higher Primary School. He was twelve years old in June 1976.

On the morning of the sixteenth of June 1976, between fifteen and twenty thousand Black South African schoolchildren marched through Soweto in protest against the apartheid government's Afrikaans Medium Decree — the regulation that required Afrikaans to be the language of instruction for half of all academic subjects in Black secondary schools. The march was peaceful. The South African Police met the marchers at Orlando West Junior Secondary School with armed force.

Hector Pieterson was struck by a police bullet near the corner of Moema Street and Vilakazi Street at approximately ten in the morning. He was the first of approximately fifteen children killed in Orlando West that day. The eighteen-year-old fellow student Mbuyisa Makhubu picked up Pieterson's body and ran toward the nearest medical aid station, accompanied by Pieterson's seventeen-year-old sister Antoinette Sithole. The photograph taken by Sam Nzima at that moment — the dying boy in Makhubu's arms, his sister running alongside — was published worldwide within forty-eight hours and became the most internationally circulated photograph of apartheid-era state violence.

The Soweto Uprising continued for two weeks. Approximately five hundred and seventy-five people died across South African townships in the suppression. The international response — particularly the U.N. mandatory arms embargo of November 1977 — was the decisive turn in the international isolation of the apartheid state.

The Hector Pieterson Memorial in Orlando West, opened in June 2002, marks the location where he died. The sixteenth of June is observed in South Africa as Youth Day in his and his fellow students' memory.

He is honored here as the schoolboy whose death photograph turned the world against apartheid.