[VOICE CLIP] 1980’s unrest: reliving the days when fear was the norm
"Our biggest crime on the day was walking in a group"
LIMPOPO – South Africa commemorates Youth Day every year on the 16th of June. Uprisings, which tragically ended with hundreds of young people killed by the apartheid government as students protested against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction led to Youth Day commemorating the 1976 Soweto youth uprising.
In 1975 protests started in African schools after a directive from the then Bantu Education Department that Afrikaans had to be used on an equal basis with English as a language of instruction in secondary schools. The issue, however, was not so much the Afrikaans as the whole system of Bantu education which was characterised by separate schools and universities, poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms and inadequately trained teachers.
The unrest didn’t stop there and carried on into the 80’s.
A Polokwane resident, then a teenager growing up in a coloured area in Johannesburg during the height of the political unrest in 1980’s, tells of how her and her friends were pushed out of a casper van to protect them from apartheid police…
