Yesterday we honoured Youth Day in South Africa, a day when we remember the hundreds of young people who were massacred in 1976 by the apartheid regime for their peaceful protests against a state education system that sought to forever keep them as economic slaves. It took the courage of children to bring the apartheid government to its knees. And young South Africans have continued to be at the forefront of national consciousness building, forcing us to re-examine entrenched ways of being through the Rhodes Must Fall movement and succeeding in toppling down an altar to a god of colonialism in a matter of weeks. Our young people are not a group to be taken lightly.
Yesterday many of us enjoyed music festivals and winter braais, kicked back our shoes and turned up our radios. But as we entertained friends and ignored incoming emails, there brewed a rumbling storm among South Africa’s young that threatens to make the “June 16’s” of tomorrow less than pleasant.