Hector Pieterson was 12 years old when police killed him during a protest by Black students that marked the beginning of the Soweto Uprising in South Africa. His death, on June 16, 1976, was captured in a photograph by Sam Nzima that generated international outrage and intensified condemnation of South Africa’s apartheid government. Pieterson and Hastings Ndlovu, another student, were the first Black protesters killed during the Soweto Uprising.Located southwest of Johannesburg,  the urban residential area of Soweto is a product of South Africa’s apartheid policies, which were formalised into law beginning in the 1940s and still have effects today, even though these laws were eliminated in the 1990s. Soweto had its origins in the informal housing and infrastructure built by Black workers arriving from rural areas to pursue livelihoods in and around Johannesburg, particularly during the 1920s and ’30s. In the 1940s the South African government established greater control over the area and maintained it, in keeping with its apartheid policies, as a place for Black people from a variety of ethnic groups, separated from those the government identified as belonging to other races. Soweto was a source of anti-apartheid protest and activism beginning in the middle decades of the 20th century.Hector Pieterson was born on August 19, 1963, the only boy among his mother and father’s four children. He was attending school in Soweto when, in 1974, South Africa’s Department of Bantu Education established the Afrikaans Medium Decree, a policy that directed higher primary and secondary schools attended by Black students in the Transvaal province—which included Soweto—to use Afrikaans as the language of instruction for some subjects. English was the dominant language of Black residents, while Afrikaans was the language of white South Africans, which meant that Black South Africans considered Afrikaans to be “the language of the oppressor,” as Desmond Tutu explained. Additionally, the new policy would negatively affect Black students’ education because many were not fluent in Afrikaans.As efforts to stop the implementation of the policy continued, organisations such as the Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steve Biko, and the South African Students’ Organisation contributed to anti-apartheid sentiment among students in Soweto and elsewhere. Eventually, as Afrikaans were more widely imposed on schools in 1976, thousands of Black students engaged in boycotts and demonstrations, protesting against the change in language policy.