Resistencia sonora, historia escénica: una reseña de *Uprize!*, de Sifiso Khanyile

On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of students moved through the streets of Soweto, South Africa, in a coordinated and peaceful demonstration against the imposition of Afrikaans as a primary language of instruction in Black schools. What began as a collective act of refusal soon became one of the defining political moments in South African history. Met with police violence, the protest transformed into a site of confrontation that would leave hundreds dead. The events of that day would endure as a defining symbol within South Africa’s political imagination, marking a powerful moment of youth resistance against apartheid. 

Yet beyond the images that have come to define the uprising lies a broader history of political education, cultural production, and collective organizing. It is within this space that Sifiso Khanyile’s documentary ¡Arriba! (2017) situates itself, revisiting the events of June 16 not only as a historical turning point, but as a moment shaped by music, poetry, theatre, and the intellectual currents of the Black Consciousness Movement.

Still from UPRIZE! (2017): Dr. Nthato Motlana, speaking on Black Consciousness – Soweto, 1977

Released in 2017, ¡Arriba! revisits the events surrounding the June 16 Soweto Uprising through archival material, testimony, music, and the cultural currents that shaped a generation of young Black South Africans. Directed by Johannesburg-based filmmaker, producer, and archive researcher Sifiso Khanyile, the documentary moves beyond a singular retelling of the uprising itself, situating it within a broader landscape of intellectual life, resistance, and community organizing. Drawing on rarely seen archival material and first-hand accounts, the film traces the intellectual and artistic forces that circulated alongside the struggle, foregrounding the role of the Black Consciousness Movement and the resistance arts that emerged during a period of censorship, imprisonment, and exile. Speaking about the film, Khanyile describes a longstanding desire to tell African stories from an African perspective. “There’s always a hunger for authenticity,” he reflects, “a desire to tell our stories through our own lens.” Through this approach, ¡Arriba! becomes not only a document of a defining political moment, but also an excavation of histories, voices, and cultural practices that continue to resonate nearly five decades later.

The Soweto Uprising is rooted in the Bantu Education System, one of apartheid’s most pervasive instruments of control. Introduced in 1953, it sought to regulate not only access to education, but also the horizons of possibility available to Black South African students. Education became a mechanism through which racial hierarchy could be reproduced, shaping who could move, work, learn, and participate within society. These conditions intensified further in 1974 when the apartheid government decreed that Afrikaans, along with English, be used as a primary language of instruction in Black schools. More than a linguistic policy, the decision extended the reach of state power into the classroom itself. As language, education, and political authority became increasingly entangled, schools transformed into spaces where frustration, debate, and collective consciousness could circulate and take on resisting forms. By the mid-1970s, a generation of students had begun to challenge not only the conditions under which they were being taught, but the broader system that sought to define the boundaries and limitations of their future.

The political consciousness that informed this generation did not emerge in isolation. Central to the period was the Black Consciousness Movement, which sought to challenge not only the legal structures of apartheid but also its psychological dimensions. Led by figures such as Steve Biko and shaped by student organizations, including the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) and the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), Black Consciousness encouraged young people to reject the internalization of racial inferiority and reclaim political agency. Within ¡Arriba!, this ideological framework emerges as a vital force underpinning the uprising, revealing how resistance was cultivated long before students entered the streets on 16 June. As Khanyile notes, the banning of liberation movements and the imprisonment or exile of political leaders created a vacuum in which a younger generation was compelled to step forward. In this context, political ideas circulated through schools, community networks, cultural spaces, and student organisations, shaping a collective vision of self-determination that would become inseparable from the events of 1976.

Still from UPRIZE! (2017): South African Students’ Organisation (SASO)

“During the late 1960s and early 1970s, people were increasingly thinking critically about self-determination and liberation, and those conversations were often embedded within cultural production. The music that emerged from that period is music I genuinely love. The art that emerged from that period is art I greatly admire. And the politics of that era have always resonated with me. For all of those reasons, making a documentary about this moment felt like a natural conclusion.”

Rather than relying solely on archival footage to recount the events of June 16, ¡Arriba! unfolds through a layering of voices, images, and testimony. Former activists, students, and organizers reflect on their experiences, moving between personal memory and political history. Throughout the film, archival material sits alongside these recollections, creating moments where individual experiences intersect with broader historical narratives. The stories that emerge are often intimate, grounded in lived experience while remaining inseparable from the wider political conditions that shaped them. In revisiting these accounts, the film remains attentive to the people who carried them, foregrounding voices that have often remained at the margins of South Africa’s dominant historical narratives. Art, music, and performance emerge throughout the film as some of the very forms through which resistance was expressed, sustained, and remembered.

Reflecting on the period, Khanyile points to the ways in which artistic production became inseparable from political life:

“As Africans, we are often confronted with the Western gaze of our narratives. Sometimes that gaze can be limited and sometimes it can be biased. There can be certain assumptions built into the way our stories are told. Because of that, there is always a hunger for authenticity, a desire to tell our stories through our own lens rather than remaining in the background of someone else’s perspective. With this particular story, I’ve always been very interested in the resistance arts of the 1970s, particularly those associated with the Black Consciousness Movement. It was a period when the liberation movements were banned and many political leaders were either imprisoned or forced into exile. As a result, there was a leadership vacuum and, in many ways, a vacuum of political consciousness. People were not allowed to speak openly about politics. Black South Africans could not freely discuss their leaders without risking imprisonment or persecution. What I found inspiring was the way young men and women stepped forward to carry the struggle during that period. They took on the responsibility of sustaining resistance under incredibly dangerous circumstances.” 

This relationship between political thought and artistic expression extends into the formal language of ¡Arriba! itself. Sound becomes one of the primary ways through which the film engages the past, not simply accompanying the archive but entering into close dialogue with it. Initially, Khanyile had hoped to incorporate recordings from the period, bringing audiences into direct contact with the sounds resonating with the Black Consciousness era. Facing the challenging financial realities of licensing archival music, the production instead took a different path. In collaboration with the Johannesburg-based record label Mushroom Hour Half Hour, the filmmakers commissioned an original score inspired by the jazz traditions, improvisational practices, and political energies of the 1970s. What emerged was not an attempt to recreate the past, but a sonic response to it, allowing contemporary musicians to enter into conversation with the archive itself. 

The process through which the score was developed mirrors the film’s broader engagement with memory and testimony. Rather than composing music after the documentary had been completed, the musicians were invited into the material while it was still taking shape. Interview recordings were shared with them daily, sometimes amounting to several hours of footage at a time. Living and working together throughout the process, the musicians responded directly to the stories they encountered on and off screen. What began as an attempt to evoke the sounds of the 1970s gradually evolved into something more expansive. As memories of resistance, loss, hope, and political awakening unfolded through the interviews, the music followed their rhythm. Reflecting on the collaboration, Khanyile notes that “it became more about creating a conversation between the visuals, the music, and the narrative.” Emerging through an ongoing exchange between musicians and material, the score enters into dialogue with the archive, responding to the rhythms, silences, and emotional weight carried by the testimonies themselves.

Still from UPRIZE! (2017): The Beaters (later known as Harari) were a seminal South African Afro-soul and funk band formed in Soweto in the 1960s

Throughout ¡Arriba!, cultural life emerges as a site of constant transformation. As political speech became increasingly constrained, ideas resurfaced through other forms and gestures. Jazz ensembles, poetry readings, school performances, and community theatre became spaces where political consciousness could be rehearsed, tested, and shared. Music carried the rhythms of liberation, while poetry moved between private reflection and public declaration, transforming language into a tool of mobilization. Elsewhere, theatre shifted beyond entertainment, becoming a space through which difficult political realities could be staged and confronted. Figures such as Gibson Kente worked within increasingly restrictive conditions, developing performances that spoke to lived experiences under apartheid while navigating the limits imposed by censorship. Across these artistic practices, expression and resistance became deeply intertwined. In the absence of political freedom, the stage, the page, and the bandstand became spaces through which new possibilities could be collectively (re)imagined and shared.

Around the time of the Soweto uprising, cultural expression in South Africa had already taken shape as a space where political thought and everyday life met under pressure. In theatre, collaborative work emerging from Johannesburg and Cape Town, including Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), created through Athol Fugard’s partnership with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, staged the realities of pass laws, labour, and imprisonment through performance built from lived experience. In poetry, Mongane Wally Serote and Oswald Mtshali gave form to township life and perception, writing in ways that carried the rhythms, tensions, and urgencies of Black urban existence into print. Alongside this, Gibson Kente’s township productions moved through schools, churches, and community halls, shaping a performance culture that existed outside formal institutions but remained deeply embedded in everyday social life. Across these different practices, expression circulated through speech, stage, and text, shaped by conditions where language itself was already a site of constraint and negotiation.

In the years following the uprising, cultural production began to shift into new forms of visibility and circulation, shaped by both intensified repression and the opening of independent spaces of expression. The launch of Staffrider magazine in 1978 became one of the key markers of this shift, creating a publishing platform where poetry, photography, fiction, and political writing could move outside state and commercial structures. It gathered work rooted in township life, student experience, and urban observation, allowing voices that had circulated informally to enter print culture with new reach and urgency. Alongside this expanding literary field, a generation of writers–including Sipho Sepamla, Mafika Gwala, Don Mattera, and Christopher van Wyk–carry forward a language shaped by the aftermath of 1976, responding to the conditions of everyday life under apartheid and the political atmosphere that followed the uprising. Across print and cultural networks, expression continues to move between lived experience and public address, carrying forward the rupture/impact of 1976 into new forms of articulation.

Still from UPRIZE! (2017): Illustation by Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi for Staffrider Magazine

The cultural reverberations of 1976 extended far beyond the uprising itself, continuing to shape South African artistic production for decades. Among the most widely recognised works is Sarafina!, Mbongeni Ngema’s stage musical that premiered in 1987 before becoming an internationally acclaimed film in 1992. Following a group of students confronting the realities of apartheid education, the production transformed the experiences of Soweto’s youth into a powerful act of collective remembrance through song, choreography, and performance. Yet the foundations for this cultural response were already being laid in the years preceding the uprising. Playwright Gibson Kente, often referred to as the father of township theatre, developed works such as I Believe y How Long, using the stage to address the social and political realities of Black South African life at a time when direct criticism of the apartheid state carried significant risk. Performed in schools, churches, and community halls, these productions created spaces where audiences could encounter reflections of their own lives and circumstances. Together, these works reveal how the legacy of 1976 continued to circulate through artistic practice, carrying the aspirations, frustrations, and political imagination of a generation long after the events themselves.

“Every year there’s a growing demand for the film, which means to me that it’s doing the right thing. And this is with audiences all around the world. Particularly at a time when a lot of young South Africans are going through periods of political apathy, talking about being apartheid-fatigued and not really being interested in apartheid-related stories, it’s really interesting to me that this is a film that keeps coming through.”

Reflecting on the film’s continued resonance, Khanyile recalls being told that ¡Arriba! is “the Sarafina! of documentaries,” a comparison that has stayed with him over the years.  Nearly three decades later, ¡Arriba! returns to many of the same historical currents, drawing on archival material and first-hand testimony to revisit the individuals, organizations, and cultural movements that shaped the period. The comparison speaks to the ways both works continue to carry the legacy of 1976 forward, ensuring that the stories, voices, and aspirations of that generation remain part of contemporary public consciousness, active, unsettled, and still in motion.

sobre el autor

Ndidi is based in Berlin and Vienna and works across analogue photography, moving image, and curatorial and editorial practice. Her work engages experimental narrative structures and visual storytelling, often drawing on archival and research-based material.

Alongside her creative work, she has experience in curatorial and programme contexts within the arts sector, including moderating and supporting film and cultural events.

Ndidi holds a Master of Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and studied philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is currently developing independent projects and expanding her practice toward filmmaking.