HE WAS BOLD, brave, wise and he sported a pair of sideburns that gave him that extra special frisson of appeal. But by and large, his presence has been lost to the annuls of history. This is Tsietsi Mashinini, one of the most significant movers and shakers behind the 16 June 1976 riots in South Africa. His biography, written by Sam Mathe and published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of those seismic riots, this year, is surprisingly the first full length biography of this man. And it’s a winner. On every level.

History research, these days, has largely been potted into one-liners and easily accessible one-sided answers to research questions. The Sturm und Drang, the grittiness and terror, the sexiness and sense of adventure of what happened then, has largely been lost to young readers or scholars. Tsietsi Mashinini: Elusive Hero of Soweto is written with a sense of pace that gives it the heart-thudding energy of a thriller.

The context: Apartheid-riddled South Africa. The white, Afrikaans-speaking government, led by the likes of Balthazar John Vorster, the prime minister in 1976, was at its wits end to repress the upcoming youth, who after close to thirty years of living under racist rule, were boiling with their own anger. Millions of South African people had been born and grown into adulthood under punitive circumstances. People, with resignation, said it was ‘how things were’. The older generation’s spirit had been broken by the arbitrary use of crime and punishment. The kind of scenario that could see an elderly man being imprisoned and beaten because he didn’t have his documents on him, in the presence of young white policemen. Because he was black.

You meet Mashinini in the streets of a language-torn Soweto. The apartheid powers that were, were forcing Afrikaans as a language medium into blacks school. The teachers themselves could not teach in Afrikaans. Mashinini is 19, he’s full of anger for the status quo and he has what it takes to turn the behemoth of society on its side, exposing its rotten belly.

This beautifully written biography, in eight chapters, skips the light fantastic in that it doesn’t kowtow to traditional biography in its structure or the dustiness of a tried and tested approach. Mathe takes the context of the riots and dovetails the energy of the young, with the damage and nurture which the language of one’s education can bring and he yields a history book that takes on the mantle and the excitement, the tears and the drama of a world gone mad, and gives it a face. He doesn’t pull back on describing the blind momentum of a mob which could take social worker Melville Edelstein in its waves of fury and beat him to a dead pulp. He had been a man adored by the community, for his work and his empathy, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All they could see was his white skin.

Mashinini only lived 33 years; his legacy is one of those that form the cornerstone of what makes our society tick, but one that also examines what makes a story become legacy. He was the firebrand hero of the youth of the 1970s. He married a beauty queen from Liberia. His death remains a mystery. Mathe’s writing is profoundly candid; he doesn’t allow the story to be subject to romantic whims of fancy. It’s history without the dust and offers an understanding of South African heroes that will have resonance for a new generation of readers.

Replete with clear maps and a body of photographs, this is a ten out of ten historical biography that will keep you gripped from page one, but will reverberate with your understanding of the fabric of South Africa ever after. This is a keeper.

• Tsietsi Mashinini Elusive Hero of Soweto: A Biography by Sam Mathe is published by Tafelberg, Cape Town, an imprint of Jonathan Ball (2026).