Soweto Uprising: A Documentary History by Julian Brown

ISBN: 9781431437009

Publisher: Jacana Media, 2026

Paperback, 443 pages

As the country approaches the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, this book, Soweto Uprising: A documentary history presents a vital and comprehensive history of the protest and its aftermath. Julian Brown takes readers through a thorough account of June 16 1976 and the events that surrounded and followed it, meticulously tracing a history through archives, stories and hitherto untapped sources.

Soweto Uprising: A documentary history presents primary sources that tell the story of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 from the contemporaneous perspectives of those involved. It places the raw material of history in the hands of a broad audience, enabling a wide variety of readers to interpret and understand a key moment in South Africa’s anti-apartheid activism from the records of the time itself.

These primary sources are not widely available in print. They reside in archives of the anti-apartheid struggle, court records and in old newspaper editions. In making these sources available to a new audience and in placing them alongside memoirs, interviews and other published sources about the uprisings, the book democratises the production of historical knowledge and empowers readers to engage with South Africa’s rich and contentious twentieth-century history of political protest and public rebellion.