Celebrating Youth Day
Photo courtesy of DTHF
June 16, 2016 marked the 40th commemoration of National Youth Day in South Africa. At first, I thought the public holiday was to celebrate youth in the same likeness as we celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day. However, Youth Day is the day that South Africa reflects on the massacre of school children during the Soweto Uprising of 1976.
A brief, yet sobering, history:
The apartheid regime had issued a decree for the language of Afrikaans to become a medium of instruction in all schools. Students revolted not only against the imposition of Afrikaans but against Bantu education because they knew it was designed to "train and fit" Africans for their role in the newly (1948) evolving apartheid society.
The apartheid ideology espoused that whites were by nature superior and that blacks were inherently inferior. The architect of institutionalised racism, Hendrik Verwoerd, at the time, the Minister of Native Affairs, had clearly expressed the regime’s views about black people and their future. Verwoerd declared, "There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour,". He continued to question the role of Africans in the apartheid society by stating, "What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live."
On the 16th of June in 1976, thousands of students gathered at school assemblies across Soweto for a protest march to Orlando Stadium. Heavily armed police opened fire on the students as they were marching peacefully and refused to disperse. Hastings Ndlovu, age 15, and 12 year-old Hector Pietersen were the first to be brutally killed by the police. The death increased to twenty three children in Soweto, but some reports indicate upwards of 200 lives lost because the incident triggered widespread violence throughout South Africa.
As part of my internship, I travelled to a nearby township with the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation to take part in the Youth Day commemoration events at Philippi Village. Students from LEAP Science and Maths Schools prepared a series of dances, songs, raps, and skits to bring awareness to horrific imposition of apartheid and the aftershock that still affects today's youth. Ranging from the unaffordability of an education to the ability for young women to make decisions regarding their reproductive health, the students were righteously empowered to bring light to these unforgotten and contemporary challenges.
Top center, bottom left - Photos courtesy of DTHF
For more information about youth and the national liberation struggle in South Africa, please visit the South African History Online website here, and to read President Zuma's 2016 Youth Day Address, click here.
