Thousands of South Africans on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, a bloody watershed in the anti-apartheid struggle when children protesting against the forced teaching of Afrikaans died in a brutal police crackdown.
President Thabo Mbeki, accompanied by dignitaries which included Nelson Mandela's former wife Winnie, led a march of hundreds from Soweto's Morris Isaacson School - one of the key points of the 1976 uprising - to a memorial to arguably its most famous victim.
Hundreds of children, veterans of the "Class of 76", council workers and civil servants took part in the five-kilometre (three-mile) trek to the Hector Pieterson Memorial. They stopped briefly to observe a minute's silence to honour the memory of Pieterson and the hundreds of other people killed by police over the next year.
"This day... is a moment of thanksgiving dedicated to the young people of our country for the contribution they made to free South Africa from the tyranny of apartheid," Mbeki later told a crowd of more than 50,000 which had gathered for the commemoration at a giant football stadium outside Soweto.
The 1976 uprising revealed the brutal face of apartheid to the world, which watched in horror as police fired teargas and bullets into crowds of children. They killed 23 people in Soweto alone on the first day, according to conservative police estimates of the time.
The protest movement spread like wildfire across the country and was met with bloody repression. A total of 575 people had died by February 1977, according to police records. Independent estimates are much higher.
The tragedy was captured in a photograph published world-wide - that of 12-year-old schoolboy Pieterson dying in the arms of a friend after being shot in the head by a police bullet.
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