Professor Sekibakiba Lekgoathi has made a case study on the untold role of Zebediela and its youth in taking up the fight started by the Soweto youth on June 16, 1976.
In a detailed presentation at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) Soweto campus to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Soweto riots, Professor Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, an associate professor of history at Wits University, discussed his case study on how rural and urban youth from Zebediela, played an understated yet significant role in the turbulent political landscape of the late 1970s.
Zebediela, under the Capricorn District Municipality, is a cluster of villages in Limpopo Province, renowned for its citrus production and historical citrus estate.
Lekgoathi’s study, titled Rural Youth and Changing Patterns of Political Mobilisation in the Northern Transvaal Village of Zebediela, 1976-1990, highlights Matladi Primary School, a boarding and day school, and the University of the North at Turfloop as focal points for the burgeoning resistance movement in Zebediela and the Northern Transvaal.
Lekgoathi notes that in the build-up to June 1976, a surge of young people migrating from urban centres such as Soweto and Pretoria townships influenced rural dynamics in Zebediela. As a result, this influx paved the way for heightened political awareness among the local youth, which would ultimately converge with the sweeping waves of the nationwide protest movement.
