Youth Day

I would like to wish everyone out there a Happy Youth Day, which is a public holiday today in South Africa. Unlike the more joyful Youth Days around the world that celebrate children just as they do fathers and mothers, South Africa's Youth Day actually stems from darker apartheid times. This day seems to be more a day of remembrance than one of celebration, but a holiday that will show that young people can change our world.
Youth Day commemorates the start of the Soweto riots of 1976, initially sparked 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.

I know it might be a lot to read, but it is very interesting-- a quick history, provided by Wikipedia:
The origin of the protests are traced back to 1949 and the Eiselen Commission's inquiry into the edification of non-whites. The commission recommended drastic changes, which were implemented through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. The legislation caused many mission schools, through which the majority of black children were educated, to lose government aid and close. Funding for black schools was drawn from taxes paid by black people, who were generally impoverished. The result was a very uneven distribution of teaching resources in black and white schools.

Black students in Soweto 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. A 1972 poll had found that 98% of young Sowetans did not want to be taught in Afrikaans.^{[citation needed]} The association of Afrikaans with apartheid prompted black South Africans to prefer English. Even the homelands regimes chose English and an indigenous African language as official languages. In addition, English was gaining prominence as the language most often used in commerce and industry. The 1974 decree was intended to forcibly reverse the decline of Afrikaans among black Africans. The Afrikaner-dominated government used the clause of the 1909 Constitution that recognized only English and Afrikaans as official languages as pretext to do so. Punt Janson, the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education at the time, was quoted as saying: "I have not consulted the African people on the language issue and I'm not going to." The decree was resented deeply by blacks as Afrikaans was widely viewed, in the words of Desmond Tutu, then Dean of Johannesburg as "the language of the oppressor". Teacher organizations such as the African Teachers Association of South Africa objected to the decree.
The resentment grew until April 30, 1976, when children at Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their rebellion then spread to many other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Teboho 'Tsietsi' Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976, to discuss what should be done. Students formed an Action Committee (later known as the Soweto Students’ Representative Council)^[4] that organized a mass rally for June 16 to make themselves heard.
On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of black students walked from their schools to Orlando Stadium for a rally to protest against having to learn through Afrikaans in school. The protest was intended to be peaceful and had been carefully planned by the Soweto Students’ Representative Council’s (SSRC) Action Committee, with support from the wider Black Consciousness Movement. Teachers in Soweto also supported the march after the Action Committee emphasized good discipline and peaceful action.
Tsietsi Mashininini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School ^[6]. The students began the march only to find out that police had barricaded the road along their intended route. The leader of the action committee asked the crowd not to provoke the police and the march continued on another route, eventually ending up near Orlando High School. The crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 students made their way towards the area of the school. Students sang and wove placards with slogans such as, "Down with Afrikaans", "Viva Azania" and "If we must do Afrikaans, Vorster must do Zulu".
The rioting continued and 23 people, including two white people, died on the first day in Soweto. Emergency clinics were swamped with injured and bloody children. It is not known how many injured children sustained bullet wounds because doctors refused to collect such details for fear that police would target the families of such children. In many cases bullet wounds were indicated on hospital records as abscesses. Emotions ran high after the massacre on June 16. Hostility between students and the police was intense, with officers shooting at random and more people joining the protesters. The township youth had been frustrated and angry for a long time and the riots became the opportunity to bring to light their grievances. The 1,500 heavily armed police officers deployed to Soweto on June 17 carried weapons including automatic rifles, stun guns, and carbines. Crowd control methods used by South African police at the time included mainly dispersement techniques, and many of the officers shot indiscriminately, killing many people.
The accounts of how many people died vary from 200 to 600. The original government figure claimed only 23 students were killed. The number of wounded was estimated to be over a thousand men, women, and children.
The aftermath of the uprising established the leading role of the ANC [African National Congress, the current ruling party with Mandela as the first president] in the liberation struggle, as it was the body best able to channel and organize students seeking the overthrow of apartheid. So, although the BCM's ideas had been important in creating the climate that gave the students the confidence to strike out, it was the ANC's non-racialism which came to dominate the discourse of liberation amongst blacks.
Happy Youth Day, everyone.