In lieu of actually writing about the anniversary of one of the most important and tragic events of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, here is a book, available fully and freely online, by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick. I Saw A Nightmare is an excellent and (so far) thorough study of the June 16, 1976 riot by students against the new government policy of teaching Afrikaans as a primary language in school; in response to the peaceful protests and strikes of the students, 26 people were killed by indiscriminate police fire into a confused but mutinous crowd. I haven’t finished Pohlandt-McCormick’s book yet, but she makes excellent use of the html format, providing easy links to running commentary, supplementary essays and key segments from other chapters. Pohlandt-McCormick’s is aiming for a kind of total history, much like Paul A. Cohen’s History in Three Keys; she starts with a detailed attempt to reconstruct the narrative of what exactly happened on June 16, using the conflicting and fragmentary stories told by official documents, memories, interviews and testimonies. The next section concentrates on the crafting of a narrative around the uprising by both the South African government, the ANC and other groups at the time, and then explores the conflicts and problems of historical memory, of who remembers, or is allowed to remember (publicly) what had happened, the appearances and disappearances of archival materials, and the failures or interpretations of other historians, followed by deep historical analysis of the long-term build-up to, and aftermath of, June 16, 1976. I Saw A Nightmare is a fine book, and an important contribution to historical memory in its own right.
