The road to 27 April 1994, Freedom Day in South Africa, started on the dusty streets of Soweto on 16 June 1976. Had Hector Pieterson not been shot dead that morning he would be a relatively young 62 today. That fact alone - 50 missed years of living - tells us how much he and other youngsters sacrificed in the service of freedom.

Several weeks ago I was fortunate to attend the opening of an academic conference organised by Wits University and the University of Johannesburg to celebrate and study the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and the protests it catalysed across South Africa. In a packed Senate Room in Solomon Mahlangu House, the opening panel was made up of four veteran activists - Seth Mazibuko, Saths Cooper, Nozipho Diseko and Sibongile Mkhabela. All four were on the ground in June 1976: organising, teaching, or, as students, caught up in the melee.

The four spoke with remarkable modesty. Their relative youth and intellectual vigour give the lie to any idea that 16 June 1976 is part of a dim and distant past.

They looked back 50 years, not in heroic nostalgia, not in the language of political cliches, not even with rancour, but with deep human insights expressed in plain language. Their words conveyed the poetry of heart-felt emotion and unresolved trauma. They had the legitimacy of witness.

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They exhibited none of the pomposity we have come to associate with Struggle braggarts.

None of the brittle sensitivity of leaders who know they have betrayed the values of liberation and so have to...