On June 16, 1976, thousands of students in Soweto took to the streets to demonstrate against Bantu Education and the imposition of Afrikaans in their schools.
There is a kind of commemoration that slips into ritual without reckoning. Each June 16, we gather to honour the children of Soweto who marched against Afrikaans as a medium of teaching and learning, who were met with bullets, and who bled and died for a future apartheid refused them. We invoke their names, display the iconic image of Hector Pieterson, and declare them heroes.
And, indeed, they were; however, by the next morning, the machinery of forgetting quietly restarts. In this way, commemoration risks becoming a substitute for responsibility. We remember the courage of the students of Soweto while neglecting the uncomfortable possibility that June 16 was never meant to be merely remembered.
It was meant to be continued.
Indeed, the learners who marched in 1976 were not asking future generations to honour them. They were asking future generations to complete a task. The fiftieth anniversary should deny us the comfort of believing that the task is finished. A Golden Jubilee demands more than remembrance. It demands reckoning.
