The play Rise, is pregnant with staggering ambition and integrity
The play beautifully reflects counter memories of June 1976, based on the scholarship of academic Sifiso Ndlovu, contained in his seminal book titled The Soweto Uprisings: Counter Memories of June 1976.
By Sandile Memela
RISE 76’s artistic team has, out of nowhere, risen to staggering heights. Maybe not quite ‘out of nowhere’ as the director is a multi-ward winner.
From where I was sitting, I felt that this is probably a stage adaptation of Sifiso Ndlovu’s The Soweto Uprisings: Counter Memories of June 1976.
But no doubt, it is a soul stirring theatrical performance. Its outstanding achievement is that it does what 33 years of commemoration has often failed to do: it humanizes the tragedy without cheapening it. This is storytelling with muscle, research, and moral courage.
Storytelling and Scope: Counter Memory on Stage
The greatest achievement of RISE 76 is its commitment to “counter memory.” Ndlovu’s book set out to broaden the cast of June 16 beyond the iconic image of Hector Pieterson.
The play honours that mission. It does not reduce 1976 to Hector, Tsietsi, and ‘police bullets.’ Instead it brings parents, teachers, principals, Black police, white doctors, nurses, and even the Broederbond inspector into the same room.
The production is torn from pages of history, yet it breathes. It traces the build up to protest not as a single explosion, but as simmering tension that began as early as February 1976 when schools reopened.
In fact, problems started in 1974.
When the textbooks arrived in 1976, they were in Afrikaans. Teachers were ordered to teach math and science in a language they barely spoke. Students refused to learn. Empty classrooms became classrooms of resistance. That slow burn is shown patiently. The audience feels the frustration before they feel the fire.
Most crucially, the play avoids divisive partisan politics. In an era where every historical event is claimed by a political party, RISE 76 refuses point scoring. It does not turn June 16 into ANC property or AZAPO property. It treats it as a human catastrophe. That is brave, and necessary.
Character and Context: No Villains, Only Humans
The play’s power lies in refusing caricatures.
Mnr De Beer, the hard-line Afrikaner school inspector carrying out Broederbond wishes, is not a cartoon villain. He believes in order, language, and cultural survival. His rigidity causes harm, but the production lets him speak. We see the policy, not just the bullet.
Alfie Ndlovu the principal – a character torn from the pages of life – can speak Afrikaans. He tries to mediate by encouraging teachers to use English to teach Afrikaans. He is pragmatic, not heroic.
Teachers are divided. Some comply, some resist and they are expelled. That division is shown without judgment. It reflects the real dilemma of Black educators caught between survival and solidarity.
The most striking characterization is the Black police officer. He raids houses in the notorious Green Mamba van to arrest Bafana, a composite character fusing Tsietsi Mashinini and Seth Mazibuko.
The officer displays brutality for approval and to please baas. Yet later justifies it: “Betrayal is survival. I too must feed my family.”
That line is uncomfortable because it is true. It reflects the self-destructive thinking of most blacks.
The play delves into motive. It asks: what makes an oppressed man become the fist of the oppressor? By showing his fear, his need, his dehumanization, the production avoids easy condemnation and forces the audience to think.
Even white police and doctors are given interiority. Kleynhans, who kills Lesley Hastings Ndlovu, the first student to die on June 13, is shown traumatized by his own act. The man is filled with remorse. Like his black counterpart, they must carry out orders.
White and black doctors and nurses at Baragwanath are depicted admitting the wounded, overwhelmed by blood and children. The play courageously shows how violence dehumanizes both the striker and the one holding the gun.
That human side to violent police is rare on South African stages and it matters.
Historical Accuracy and Fact Base
RISE 76 treats Ndlovu’s scholarship with respect. The production is fact based and accurate. It resurrects details often omitted: the June 13 strategic planning meeting that resolved the demonstration would be peaceful. The role of radical poetry as “inflammatory” material that invited police attention.
There is information from the Cillie Commission testimonies. We learn that the ratio was of 48 police against over 2000 students. They could not survive
Most importantly, the play depicts the experience and agony of Sam Nzima, who captured the photograph of Hector. We learn how doing his job destroyed his family life and career.
What stays in the mind is the trauma, agony and pain of the black woman kneeling in agony. This visual highlights and centres the overlooked pain of Black mothers.
It all started with a bullet, and the play makes you feel the weight of that first bullet. It shows teachers inheriting trauma. It shows an uncle searching for a four year old lost in the chaos while the mother keeps her pain silent.
That four year old’s story is a gut punch. It reminds us that June 16 was not only about students with placards. It was about children, homes, and futures interrupted.
The depiction of June 13, three days before June 16, where Lesley Hastings Ndlovu was killed, is historically vital. Many productions jump straight to June 16. RISE 76 insists we see the escalation.
We learn that 176 students died that day across Soweto. The number is spoken, not shouted. That restraint makes it heavier.
Form, Pacing, and Artistic Choices
The production is raw and riveting. Quite engaging, demanding focused attention on this history lesson taught from the pages of life.
The acting is tight. The use of space turns the stage into classrooms, police vans, hospitals, and kitchens. Sound and movement carry the tension.
The poetry that got Bafana killed is performed with urgency. When Bafana is killed “for poetry,” the audience understands why words were feared by the state.
For some impatient cynics familiar with the history, the play is too long. But the comprehensive detail is what makes it rich and also makes heavy.
At times the audience drowns in testimony. And the dead quiet is punctuated by moans and sobs. And tears well in people’s eyes.
The Cillie Commission excerpts, the multiple teacher debates, the extended hospital scenes, all valuable, but they slow momentum.
Maybe a sharper edit would not weaken the work. It would let the emotional peaks land harder. “Riveting” should not mean “exhausting.” For a 1976 story, stamina is needed, but economy is also a form of respect for the audience.
Well, you can please some but not all the people all the time.
Another artistic choice worth noting: the production presents hard cold facts without much analysis or interpretation.
In fact, for me, it is torn from Ndlovu’s Counter Memories book. That it is factual and straight is a strength and a limit.
Strength, because it avoids lecturing and lets viewers draw their own conclusions. Limit, because audiences unfamiliar with 1976 may leave moved but unclear about the structural forces: apartheid education policy, Bantu Education, labor needs, advent of Black Consciousness, the Frelimo rallies.
Perhaps a few framing moments, perhaps through a narrator or projected text, could contextualize without preaching.
Why This Matters Now
For the first time in 33 years of democracy, a mainstream theatrical work depicts the unfolding tragedy of imposing Afrikaans as a medium of instruction without reducing it to slogan.
It shows language as a weapon of policy, not just a cultural issue. That is urgent today when debates about language, curriculum, and “decolonization” are alive in universities and schools.
RISE 76 reminds us that language policy is never neutral. It shapes who gets to learn, who gets to lead, and who gets buried.
The play also intervenes in how we remember Black participation. By showing Black police, Black principals, and Black parents who disagreed, it complicates the “us vs them” narrative. It shows that oppression works by recruiting the oppressed. That lesson is painful but necessary for any real discussion of accountability and healing.
Verdict
RISE 76 has produced a work of staggering ambition and integrity. It is great storytelling because it trusts the audience.
It does not manipulate. It presents. It contextualizes. It balances the perspectives of teachers who wanted to teach, students who refused to learn, police who needed to feed families, and parents who buried children. And the black and white police who had to carry out orders without question for … survival and promotion.
Yes, it is too long. But there is a 15 minutes break. It remains powerful and soul stirring to the end.
This is the kind of theatre South Africa needs: research driven, morally complex, and rooted in the human experience.
It honours Sifiso Ndlovu’s academic work by making it live on stage. It honours the dead by refusing to use them for propaganda. It honours the living by showing that trauma was inherited by teachers, doctors, nurses, and even some police.
If you care about history, about language, about how ordinary people get caught in political machines, see this play. Take your children. Take your students. Let them sit with the discomfort. June 16 was not just a date. It was a wound. RISE 76 does not bandage it. It opens it so we can see clearly, and maybe, finally, heal properly.
Yes, this is a must see production. Staggering in scope, soul stirring in execution, and historically responsible.
Don’t die before you see this play. It runs until 28 June. It will be extended, I think.
Rise 76 opened at Mannie Manim Theatre at the Market Theatre, and will run till June 28, 2026.