Exploring the legacy of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, this article examines how South African graduates are redefining success through entrepreneurship in the face of high unemployment.
There is a version of the 1976 Soweto Uprising that has been told so many times it has acquired the smooth, untroubling quality of legend. Young people marched. They were met with violence.
They refused to stop. Their courage changed the trajectory of a country.
But there is a harder version of that story, one the RESET@50 framework is trying to raise. What exactly were those students marching toward? And fifty years on, how close are we?
The 1976 generation was not marching only against a language policy. They were marching against a system that had decided, with bureaucratic precision, what kind of economic life a Black South African child was entitled to aspire to.
