South Africa: On the anniversary of the uprising that rocked South Africa, the struggle to improve conditions goes on, writes Rebecca Harrison
All David Kutumela could think about when South African police gunned down his school mates 30 years ago was how to get his hands on an AK-47.
"We grabbed a police dog and stoned it to death," Mr Kutumela, 18 at the time, said on the eve of the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising, which sparked a wave of riots.
Thirty years on, activists like Mr Kutumela are respected members of society who live in comfortable homes, encapsulating how far South Africa has come in 12 years of democracy, even if for some, life has changed less than they would like.
Despite the scourges of crime and HIV/Aids, the children of those who took part in the protest are more interested in well-paid jobs, mobile phones and designer clothes than in the racial politics that defined their parents' generation.
The eruption on June 16th, 1976, was triggered by the apartheid government's insistence that pupils be taught in Afrikaans, spoken by the mostly Dutch-descended ruling Afrikaners.
Jabu Ngwenya, now 51, worked underground recruiting fighters for the then banned but now ruling African National Congress in 1976 and helped orchestrate the Soweto march that quickly became a defining moment in the anti-apartheid struggle.
In an interview a stone's throw from where police shot dead the 13-year-old black student Hector Pieterson, Mr Ngwenya described the scene when he arrived after the shooting.
"There was pandemonium. We threw petrol bombs at anything government-owned, at bottle stores, at everything," he said in the Hector Pieterson museum, a big tourist draw.
"But what I saw was hope. This was our day, the chance to make the country ungovernable," Mr Ngwenya added.
His son, Smangaliso, is now 21 - the same age Mr Ngwenya was when he took to the streets to fight for his freedom - and is training to be a pilot. "Can you imagine a black pilot back then?" laughed Mr Ngwenya.
"He has so many opportunities that I never had."
Soweto has changed too. "It used to be so dark, now there are lights everywhere. And not just lights - shopping malls, gas stations, restaurants."
Mr Ngwenya and his family embody the new South African dream - with opportunity for all, regardless of race.
But they also mask a dark underbelly in Soweto and other South African townships, where acres of rickety tin shacks sprawl behind the neat rows of family homes, crime is rampant and more than a quarter of the population is jobless.
"What has changed since 1976?" asked 53-year-old Sydney Moahludi, who scrapes by on a government grant and the money he earns from selling snacks and cigarettes on the street. "I had no job then, I have no job now. My son is 18 and what are his chances of getting work?"
Soweto's spanking new shopping malls testify to South Africa's booming economy, spurred by an expanding black middle-class, low interest rates and tax cuts.
But a trip to its newest shopping centre also highlighted South Africa's struggle to improve its creaking infrastructure and to deliver on pledges for better housing and utilities. The doors were shut at 1pm in the afternoon. Why? There was a power cut.