June 17, 2005
By Lucille Davie
HECTOR Pieterson's mother had a dream several months before 16 June, 1976 - it was a dream that prepared her for her son's tragic death on that day.
Dorothy Molefi says she had dreamed that she worked in a butchery; while there, she wrapped up a piece of meat.
"This dream prepared me. I thought of it on the day and it made me strong. I was very strong because I wanted to bury him," she says.
In an interview in 2001 her daughter, Antoinette Sithole, confirms that on the day that her 12-year-old brother Hector died, her mother had been very strong.
"My mother's strength - she was stronger than my father - helped me come to terms with death. I can accept now that we are all going to die."
Molefi, a friendly, cheerful woman, says she had hoped that Hector was only injured and was still in hospital. She went to the mortuary three days after his death, on the police's advice. They had recommended that she waited until things had quietened a little. When she saw her son's body at the mortuary, he had a bullet wound in his neck, she says softly.
It took three weeks to get his remains. "He was the last one of the children to be buried."
She found the funeral "very hard". "I didn't want to be too sad, in case everything didn't go right." Hector is buried at Avalon Cemetery in Soweto.
He was one of six children she had - three daughters and a son with her first husband, and two daughters with her second husband. Hector's father died two years ago.
Hector would be 41 this year - does she ever think about that? "Yes, I think about him a lot. He was clever, a jolly, smiling child," she says.
He was also popular, always happy and singing. Molefi doesn't understand why the police shot at children: "They are also parents."
Expressing regret that she doesn't have a photograph of her only son, Molefi says journalists came to her on the day he died and asked for photographs, promising to return them. "They didn't bring them back," she exclaims, "I am very cross, very sad."
Molefi has had to bury a second child: in 1997 her 15-year-old daughter, Debbie, died in a car accident.
"She was a very funny girl," she says. But this second death "wasn't so hard" for her to bear. Once again, there was an incident several days before the accident that gave her a premonition of her daughter's death.
"There was a treat at school, but we had no money to let her go, so she stayed at home. She cried the whole night. I knew something was coming."
Molefi, 62, now a pensioner and grandmother of 10, was born in Pimville in Soweto, and at the age of 13 moved to Zone 10 in Meadowlands, where she has lived ever since. Her home is a typical four-roomed brick house with a grey, corrugated asbestos roof, set on a tiny plot, with a concrete wall enclosing a patch of grass and a single peach tree.
Molefi worked as a factory worker until she resigned two years ago.
The Hector Pieterson Museum in Orlando West, located several blocks from where Hector was shot, commemorates the day on which it is estimated that more than 200 people died, and hundreds were injured. Sithole works in the museum.
At issue was the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools, a directive issued to school principals at the beginning of 1976. Pupils reacted angrily to the instruction, meeting surreptitiously in the months before the June march. Their anger exploded on 16 June, when thousands of school children marched towards Orlando Stadium, meeting police in Orlando West.
The result was a violent confrontation between the two groups. Similar uprisings spread around the country, making 1976 the year in which apartheid came under furious and sustained attack. This continued through the 1980s, finally leading to the end of repressive rule, with democratic elections in 1994.
After almost 30 years, Sithole is philosophical about Hector's death. "To me and my family, Hector did not die in vain."
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