Antoinette Sithole spoke about her role in a high school student-led demonstration against apartheid in Soweto, South Africa. Director of Multicultural Education Holly Wilson and a group of Guilford students invited Sithole to the Bryan Jr. Auditorium on Nov. 17 after hearing Sithole tell her story while on a trip in South Africa.Sithole’s presentation began with background on Soweto’s living conditions at the time of the demonstration, showing slides of small run-down homes and children playing soccer in the street. Another staple of Soweto was its racial identity.

While Johannesburg was known as the white city, Soweto was where the black people lived.

“Black power was a key into Soweto,” said Sithole in her South African accent.

She spoke of groups of patrolling people; if you did not say “black power,” they would not let you remain in Soweto.

The students carried that attitude into the demonstration that occurred on June 17, 1976.

Four high schools, including Sithole’s, chose to proclaim their wish for equality and nonbiased education in the streets of Soweto. They wanted to show their imprisoned leaders – Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu – that the struggle for equality would not die. Nor would they abandon their goal of an education that focused on their history, not simply white South African history.

Pictures of Sithole and her peers flashed across the auditorium screen. They filled the streets in their school uniforms, raising signs to the sky that called for equal education.

Sithole did not anticipate that her younger brother, not yet in high school, would be taking part in the demonstration. Only high school students were supposed to be in the streets of Soweto that day.

Sithole remembers seeing him across the street, too young, in her mind, to be in such a chaotic scene with students pressed shoulder to shoulder, chanting at the tops of their lungs. She lost him in the crowd.

“All of a sudden there was a shot,” said Sithole.

Sithole watched as protesters descended around the area of the noise, and a man emerged from the crowd carrying a limp boy in his arms. Sithole remembers seeing her brother’s face, and the blood pouring from his mouth.

The next picture showed the man, a protester but too old to be in high school, carrying her brother in his arms, with Sithole screaming to his right.

“That picture impacted a lot of people,” said Wilson, recalling the picture as a symbol of apartheid.

Sithole told of how they ran with her brother to a nearby hospital, and how the doctor told her there was nothing he could do. Her brother was dead.

“I was in disbelief, but the demonstration went on,” said Sithole. “Outside it was another chapter.”

She recalled the protesters destroying any government property in sight, and she remembers her fellow students seeing a white man get out of his car and doing whatever they could to hurt him.

Although the demonstration turned in a violent direction that Sithole did not expect, the students caught the attention of South Africa. One newspaper headline read “(Our education) makes us feel inferior.”

The students’ activism led to eventual change in the education of South Africa’s youth, but Sithole did not want that day, or her brother’s death, to be forgotten. She said she thought a museum would be a good way to commemorate her brother and her peers for what they did together that day.

Front and center in Sithole’s museum is the picture of her dead brother in the man’s arms, with Sithole screaming to the side. Her brother’s spirit lives on through the education of South Africa’s youth today.

“My brother is a symbol of the demonstrations in Soweto,” said Sithole when speaking about her museum, “but we all know it’s about all those who died that day.