What is June 16, and what ought it to be?
This Tuesday, June 16, Namibia joins the rest of the continent – if not the international community – in supposedly remembering and paying tribute to the South African youth, some of whom, on this day 50 years ago, paid dearly with their lives.
Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
This Tuesday, June 16, Namibia joins the rest of the continent – if not the international community – in supposedly remembering and paying tribute to the South African youth, some of whom, on this day 50 years ago, paid dearly with their lives.
Why did they pay dearly with their lives, and who took the lives of some of them brutally? This was for being part of the broader resistance of the South African black majority and their sympathisers – a resistance that included armed resistance – against apartheid and all its manifestations.
Yours Truly Ideologically cannot but emphasise resistance against apartheid and all its manifestations, to dispel the misinterpretation that has through the years, and even to this day in the post-colonial era in both South Africa and Namibia, been peddled: that the 1976 boiling point in South Africa, spearheaded by the youth, was simply about Bantu Education – particularly about the South African youth’s rejection of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction.
