Youth Arise – June 16 Event

Progressive youth, civic, labour and faith based formations joins forces for Youth Day cultural and hiphop cypha which includes rap, poetry and dance.

16 June 2017

10:00 – 16:00

Site B Hall, Khayelitsha

We reject the notion that the youth of today is free. We cannot be free when millions of people in this country are starving and unemployed;  or when violence against women and children continues unabated. We cannot be free until there is free decolonised and decommodified education and we cannot be free until we have redistributed the land.

As youth we want to define what freedom really means. To this end we will host “Youth Commissions” to plan the way forward on the following 4 focus areas:

1.  Free education
2. Occupying urban and rural land
3. Unemployment
4. Gender based violence

These themes would be couched in a political context taking the following into account. Nothing substantial has changed for the youth since 1994. The youth today are facing many of the same challenges

June 16 1976: the struggle continues

Amandla! Magazine Issue 46 did a feature ‘40 years since 1976’ to commemorate June 16, 1976 in Soweto. Amandla! was looking to draw lessons from the student rebellion of ‘76 within the context that we are organising in today, with the rise of the South African student movement in 2015 in mind.

Here is links to a collection of articles:

1. Is our 1976 moment still to come?
2. The Black Consciousness Movement and student demonstation: Kroonstad 1976
3. From Turfloop to Soweto and back again: the dialectic of 1976
4. The black students rebellion of 1976

[Video] June 16: Soweto Youth Uprisings

A 3-miunute piece on the significance of June 16, The Soweto Uprising featuring archival footage and interviews with an Aunt of one of our Global Girl who lost a brother in the march, and Dr. Peter Magubane, the award-winning photo-journalist who covered the event.

*Featured image: Imraan Christians