Teboho "Tsietsi" MacDonald Mashinini (born January 27, 1957 in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto, South Africa, died summer, 1990 in Conakry, Guinea) was the primary student leader of the Soweto Uprising that began in Soweto and spread across South Africa in June, 1976.
Mashinini was a bright, popular and successful student at Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto where he was the head of the debate team and president of the Methodist Youth Guild.
A move by South Africa's apartheid government to make the white, colonial language Afrikaans an equal mandatory language of education for all South Africans in conjunction with English was extremely unpopular with black, Bantu and English-speaking South African students.
A student himself, Mashinini planned a mass demonstration by students for June 16, 1976. This demonstration which would become known as the Soweto Uprising lasted for three days during which several hundred people were killed, the majority of them black students.
Having been identified as the leader of the uprising by the South African government, Mashinini fled South Africa in exile, first to London then later to various other African countries, including Liberia where he was briefly married to Miss Liberia 1977, Welma Campbell.
He died under mysterious circumstances, possibly of AIDS, possibly of homicide, in the summer of 1990 while in exile in Guinea.[1] His body was repatriated to South Africa on August 4, 1990 where he was interred in Avalon Cemetery. His grave bears the epitaph "Black Power."[2]