Briefing Paper 654 – Youth Day 50 Years On by Lois Law
The 16th of June 2026 marked 50 years since the Soweto uprising, when thousands of school children took to the streets to protest the imposition of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium of instruction under the apartheid government’s system of Bantu Education, and were met with bullets. The deep-seated cause was the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which was designed to deliver highly inferior, restricted education to African children to prepare them for a life of subservience.