remembering the Soweto uprisings

Probably the end of the Apartheid in South Africa started with education. It was the quest for better and fair educational system that triggered the students’ protest against the regime in Soweto that soon spread all over South Africa. The trigger was the introduction of Afrikaner language, spoken by the white Boers minority   , the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa that was ruling the country. Yesterday it was exactly the 40^th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, a national pretest movement that the regime suppressed with brutal violence and force.

I am trying to imagine what would have happened if the government had not responded to the students’ protest with such massive brutality. Would have the apartheid as system of controlling and suppressing the lives of the black and Indian origin South Africans survived longer?

What if in that situation the political leadership of the regime would have given up on the legitimate demands of the protesters and started a slow process of reconciliation without losing decades before the release of Nelson Mandela from jail?

It was the 16^th of June 1976 when the protests erupted and in few weeks of times, hundreds of lives were taken, hundreds of students were killed by the regime.

In South Africa, a country still in transition, the 16^th of June is a day of public holiday, a day of remembrance and coming together in unity. It is now Youth Day to remember the importance of youths in the society.

That day in June 1976 is history, not just of a nation or a continent but it should be a day marked all over the world to commemorate what desperation and frustration can lead when it battles a dogmatic and rigid ideology rooted in racisms and discrimination.

The apartheid system was built on the belief that a minority can dominate the majority, anchored on the values of supremacy and racial hierarchies, where I can either belong to the domineering group or to the dominated one depending on a divine destiny granted upon birth.

Let’s remember the deaths of the Soweto Uprisings and let’s re-think the current challenges faced by the world: poverty, inequality, discrimination, dogmatic thinking lead to disaster.

  Some interesting articles on the Soweto uprisings