Memory, Archives, and Commemoration: Remembering the Soweto Uprising of 16 June, 1976

Livestream link here.

 

Much of our work as librarians, as library staff, as archivists, and as educators, is to work to hold and store memory. We work to facilitate a remembering, whether our own or that of another place or time. Our work as people extends beyond that too; we are storytellers. Some of us carry these stories in our minds, some in our art - poetry, fiction, photographs, oral history, or on our bodies. On 16 June 1976, 50 years ago, and in the days immediately after, between 600 and 1000 people were killed by the South African apartheid state. On 16 June 2026, we come together to remember the young people whose lives were taken in order to entirely suppress and undermine the education of black and brown people of South Africa. We work to remember and to commemorate our people, to carry and tell their stories. 

 

Speaker Bio

Wilton Schereka is a scholar, archivist, activist, and writer from Cape Town, South Africa. He has two MA degrees- one from the University of the Western Cape in History on questions of blackness, Afrofuturism, and black electronic music. The second is from Brown University in Africana studies. He is in the final stages of his PhD at the University of the Western Cape on the work of struggle song and sound in the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. As archivist, Wilton has worked in the archives of the District Six Museum in Cape Town. In 2025 he was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst.