BETWEEN 1972 AND 1975 SCHOOLING IN SOWETO WAS DRAMATICALLY transformed. Under pressure from industrialists who desperately required more black labour, especially in semi-skilled jobs, the state reversed its policy of not building schools in urban townships, and during this period forty new schools were built in Soweto, including a number of secondary schools. As a consequence the student population increased exponentially over a very short space of time – in the late 1960s the number of students in Soweto was estimated at about 90 000 but in 1976 that figure had increased to 170 000. Significantly, the number of secondary school students registered an even more spectacular rate of growth, from 12 656 in 1974 to 34 656 in 1976. However, just as the demand for schooling increased, state investment in urban African education dropped dramatically again from about 1974. In fact, there was a stark racially-based inequality in state expenditure on education: R644 per white student compared to a mere R42 per African child, with Soweto parents having to pay school fees of R102 a year. Massive overcrowding in schools, particularly in the entry level of secondary school, reached crisis proportions in 1976, and inevitably added to the growing discontent among secondary school students.

Conditions in the township were deteriorating. Even as the population of Soweto grew, the provision of public housing declined sharply. According to the historian Clive Glaser, between 1966 and 1969 the state built fewer than 2000 new houses in Soweto. By the early 1970s the extent of the mounting housing crisis in Soweto became apparent. An industry survey found in 1970 that an average of thirteen people lived in each ‘match-box’ house in the township, and five years later that figure had increased to seventeen. Moreover, only fourteen per cent of households had electricity and a meager three per cent had access to hot water. This, too, contributed to the anger felt by an increasing number of township residents towards the apartheid system. There was a growing list of grievances but not yet a single issue around which a general campaign could coalesce and which activists could use to mobilise in schools and the broader community.