The Seventies

The Seventies are remembered as a period when national upheaval pressed into the secluded Kat River valley. In the spring of 1976, the distant fires of political change seemed close enough to shape the expectations of teenagers growing up there.

Upheaval Reaches the Valley

The decade is described as the century’s bleakest and most turbulent. Soweto was burning, and the heat of those flames could be felt in the small, hidden hamlet of the forgotten valley. The account links a nationally charged period to a remote local setting without suggesting that the valley stood apart from the upheaval around it.

The Spring of 1976

In the spring of 1976, the atmosphere carried an anticipation of change and of things still to come. Thobela Mpayipheli and the narrator were both fourteen, and their shared childhood in the Ciskei gives that historical moment a personal scale: the decade’s unrest is recalled not only as public crisis but as a pressure felt by young people in a particular place.