Youth Day

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Youth Day, held on 16 June each year, in South Africa commemorates the start of the Soweto riots of 1976, initially sparked off by a Government edict that all instruction in black schools would be held in Afrikaans. The iconic picture of Hector Pieterson, a black schoolchild shot by the police, brought home to many people within and outside South Africa the brutalities of the Apartheid regime.

Black students in Soweto, a township close to Johannesburg, protested against the "Afrikaans Medium Decree" of 1974 which forced all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction.

While all schools (for both whites and blacks) had to provide instruction in both Afrikaans and English as languages, white students learned all subjects in their native language, either English or Afrikaans.

The Regional Director of Bantu Education in the Northern Transvaal Region, J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five onwards. English would be the medium of instruction for general science and practical subjects (home crafts, needlework, woodwork, metalwork, art, agricultural science). The indigenous languages would be used for religious instruction, music, and physical culture.

Although unreliable for a number of reasons, a 1972 poll had found that 98% of the Sowetan youth did not want to be taught in Afrikaans, which they associated with apartheid. The poll indicated that they would prefer to be taught in English. Even the despised "homelands" regimes chose English, and their indigenous African language as official languages. (The "homelands" were: Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, KwaZulu, Lebowa, Qwaqwa, the Transkei and Venda).

English was gaining prominence globally as the language most often used in commerce and industry. The 1974 decree was intended to forcibly reverse the decline in the use of Afrikaans among black Africans. The Afrikaner-dominated Government used the clause of the 1909 Constitution that recognised only English and Afrikaans as official languages as a pretext to do so.

The Soweto riots were a turning point in the struggle against apartheid, the first major battle in what was to be a long war against the White Supremacist regime.