Nelvis Qekema reminds South Africa’s President Ramaphosa of his Black consciousness roots and calls for social justice for the country’s majority Black community living under historical and persisting injustices.

Black people need to write their own stories; to keep some aspects of our lives forever secret and unwritten is not helpful at all.  There is also need to fund projects that document these stories, as we cannot forever react to the deliberate distortions of our being by the global white supremacist establishment.

Contrary to repeated claims, the Soweto Uprising of 40 years ago was organised and led by student members of the Black Consciousness Movement of Steve Biko. They are the people who politicised other students and imbued them with the revolutionary black consciousness philosophy. They were all found guilty of sedition in the Soweto 11 trial.

Che Guevara might well have had Qunta in mind when he declared that: “I don’t care if I fall, as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting”.

The Black Consciousness Movement is barely acknowledged in commemorations of the Soweto uprising, yet the role it and its AZAPO cadres played in mobilising the masses was critical, writes Nelvis Qekema. June 16 does not ‘belong’ to the ANC, argues Qekema; it belongs to the people.