The Class of 1976 made it clear what inspired their protest and what they were fighting for. On the 50th anniversary of the rebellion, young people in a very different country still want their voices heard. Times have changed, but the issues are no less serious.
On June 16, 1976, thousands of black students walked out of schools throughout Soweto and marched into history. What happened next – police shootings, multiple deaths and widespread rebellion across South Africa – was not the result of a spontaneous moment of anger, but of months of organized resistance against the apartheid government's imposition of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium of instruction and a Bantu education system designed to deliberately keep the future of black children short.
According to Professor Noor Neftagodian, head of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, students in Alexandra, the East Rand and Cape Town took action in solidarity with their Soweto comrades, sparking the first national anti-apartheid movement since the early 1960s.
Fifty years later, South Africa is a democracy. But for its youth, the area of conflict has changed rather than disappeared.
a different struggle
Fifty years later, the driving forces of inequality in the lives of young South Africans remain all too familiar. According to Leandy Erasmus, writing in Journal of Human Rights and Social WorkThose drivers are poverty, rurality, gender-based violence and ethnicity, and the most seriously affected dimensions are education, healthcare, service delivery and unemployment.
Statistics South Africa's Quarterly Labor…