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Fifty years ago, on June 16, 1976, thousands of South African youth took to the streets in protest of the apartheid regime's Bantu Education policy.
In 1974, the regime decreed that Afrikaans should be the language of instruction in Black schools, alongside English, effectively banning mother-tongue language instructions in schools.
Black students, teachers, and parents strongly rejected the policy forcing pupils to learn in the language of the oppressor, which exacerbated the existing policies that saw an inferior standard of education and significantly reduced funding to Black schools.
Many viewed this as a further move by the oppressive apartheid government to intentionally cause Black students to fail academically.
