Youth Day

June 16th is a National Holiday in South Africa to commemorate the Soweto massacre (1976). It is ‘Youth Day’ to honor the children who were killed or wounded in the struggle against apartheid. On June 16, 1976, schoolchildren protesting apartheid and its inequities in education were massacred by the South African security forces in Soweto, a township near Johannesburg.

By the mid-1970s many of the African National Congress (ANC) leaders were in jail, in exile or dead. South African students became a significant organized force, particularly in the absence of their elders.

Many South African youth were influenced by Steve Biko, the Black South African resistance leader. Biko (who was inspired by MLK Jr) believed that black South Africans were taught to believe that they were inferior to whites. Liberation, gained through Black Consciousness, would come when the mind was free from this violent ideology. Black Consciousness stressed the need for Black people in South Africa to free themselves from the mental oppression that taught them that white people were somehow innately superior to blacks.

School pupils sensitive to this message began to organize and protest the fact that their schools were to instruct in Afrikaans, the ‘language of the oppressor.’ On the 16th of June 1976 in Soweto (so named as the South West Township in relation to Johannesburg) a school pupils' committee organized a mass march to deliver their complaints to the local authorities. This peaceful march was met with a violent response; the police shot several students. The students then went on a rampage and destroyed much of the township; the riots continued for several days. Some 600 children are thought to have been killed in the ‘Soweto disturbances.’

The Soweto uprising, as it became known, marks an important point, because from that point onward there was constant and violent unrest across South Africa.

The massacre is powerfully reenacted as the closing 8 minutes of the movie, “Cry Freedom: The Steve Biko Story” (1988). I found a good clip on YouTube, but it is in French! At the end of the movie, white journalist Donald Woods (played by Kevin Kline) is fleeing apartheid South Africa with his family by plane. He reflects on a conversation he has with Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) on the eve of the Soweto riots. Biko tells Woods; “It is the beginning of the end. Change the way people think and you change everything.” Then the events of June 16th are depicted in painfully violent detail.

If the French bothers you start at 1:50.....




About.com provides this context:

“In 1953 the Apartheid Government enacted The Bantu Education Act, which established a Black Education Department in the Department of Native Affairs. The role of this department was to compile a curriculum that suited the "nature and requirements of the black people." The author of the legislation, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd (then Minister of Native Affairs, later Prime Minister), stated: "Natives [blacks] must be taught from an early age that equality with Europeans [whites] is not for them." Black people were not to receive an education that would lead them to aspire to positions they wouldn't be allowed to hold in society. Instead they were to receive education designed to provide them with skills to serve their own people in the homelands or to work in laboring jobs under whites.”

And:

“In 1975 South Africa entered a period of economic depression. Schools were starved of funds -- the government spent R644 a year on a white child's education but only R42 on a black child."