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ANALYSIS | Echoes down the corridor: The meaning of June 16

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The class of 1976 shook off the previous generation’s climate of fear and showed the country what it could achieve through mobilisation. Now, more than ever, we need to take heed.

They showed too that it was possible to do these things in a nonsectarian way — that you did not have to belong to a particular political party to fight the state — and that a wide range of political, social, cultural, religious and social views could come together to fight for a common cause. They showed especially young schoolgoers that they too could join the fight and that it was not just limited to Soweto, as some accounts of June 16 seem to suggest.

What the students showed through their courageous acts of self-sacrifice and their determination is that no society needs to tolerate injustice or to believe that nothing can be done to end these desperate times. Who can say that the country is not in the grip of an unprecedented crisis given the levels of corruption, inequality, unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, poor education, crime, degrading health, mounting energy and transport costs, and levels of debt that the vast majority of the people must endure daily through no fault of their own? Even the middle classes in society are not spared these impoverishing effects.

 

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Besides advertising a sterile ideology, this analysis perpetuates the injustice of treating the June 16 generation as fossils. They are nowhere to be seen today, neither disadvantaged nor successful, owed nothing for they are a subject of social palaeontology. What a mess!

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