South African Communist Party Statement on the 2024 Youth Day
16 June 2024
Sunday, 16 June 2024, marked the 48th anniversary of the courageous student and youth uprising of 16 June 1976. Unlike the youth of 1976, who lived during the era of apartheid oppression, today’s youth live in a different context. After decades of struggle, our liberation movement dislodged the apartheid regime in 1994, ending the last of the colonial oppressive regimes in our country. The South African Communist Party (SACP) takes this opportunity to salute the youth for the great role they have played in the liberation struggle.
Led by the African National Congress in alliance with the SACP and the progressive trade union movement, which culminated in the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in the 1980s, and supported by a variety of sectoral and mass democratic organisations, including the progressive civic movement and others that formed part of the United Democratic Front, the defeat of the apartheid regime ushered in the current democratic dispensation. This new era opened up opportunities that had been previously denied to the youth of the formerly oppressed black majority, as well as to girls and young women under patriarchal oppression.
For instance, as a direct fruit of our hard-won democratic breakthrough against the apartheid regime in April 1994, access to education has massively expanded. This includes education from early childhood development and the foundation phase, through primary and secondary schooling, up to colleges and universities. South Africa has produced more graduates at all levels of education since 1994 than in any other 30 years of our country’s history, a fact that certain sections of our society unfairly want us to overlook and never use in comparative terms.
In contrast, for the youth to appreciate their generational tasks, they need a historical perspective. It is essential for youth to know where their people come from, what challenges they faced, who created those challenges and why – based on material interests, how the people overcame those challenges, what achievements they realised and what struggles remain to be won. These are some of the questions that the youth of 1976 understood, leading to the uprising they took upon themselves to advance. Following that, a rising number of young people swelled the ranks of our armed struggle against the apartheid regime under the joint ANC and SACP people’s liberation army, the real uMkhonto weSizwe – not the fake group recently registered as a political party with stolen identities.
The youth began standing up against colonialism and apartheid long before 1976.
During that era, they understood the path and endgame of their struggle, which is why they continued to mobilise from generation to generation. The youth of the 1940s, for example, rallied around the slogan, “Africa’s cause must triumph”, advocating for African development, progress, and national liberation to secure a rightful and honourable place internationally. This groundwork nurtured future leaders of quality for the continent.
Notably, our liberation movement’s efforts led to the establishment of numerous youth and student associations internationally, including the African Student Association, which advanced non-racialism. In South Africa, the cause of oppressed youth found expression through various slogans. For instance, the youth mobilisation slogan of the 1940s and 1950s was “Freedom in our lifetime”.
Later, the student movement adopted the motto “Organise, Learn, Produce”. In the 1980s, following the youth uprising of the 1970s, the South African Youth Congress rallied behind the slogan “Victory is Certain – Freedom or Death”. These slogans underscored the evolving focus and determination of the oppressed youth in their quest for liberation and non-racial development.
The way forward
Today, the youth need approaches that are suitable and effective for current conditions, different from the strategies and tactics of the past that matched their respective contexts.
The challenges facing the youth include a high rate of unemployment. This requires structural economic transformation and development, a high-impact comprehensive industrial policy, a supportive macroeconomic framework, and a skills revolution that incorporates research and development and other skills required by state-of-the-art technological inventions. To achieve this aim, the working-class movement needs greater involvement of youth guided by scientific knowledge in the struggle for working-class policy breakthroughs, among others.
The struggle is not over. Taking cues from the youth of 1976, today’s youth need to deepen their activism, especially in progressive student and working-class struggles, to foster broader unity, forge a popular Left front and build a powerful, socialist movement among workers and poor to overcome problems and challenges emanating from the exploitative capitalist system and to replace it with the caring socialist system.
This is also a period during which counter-revolution, in various forms and from different angles, poses a serious threat to the national democratic revolution. The primary task of the youth, as part of the working class, is to oppose counter-revolution, regardless of those involved in it. This is a crucial message emerging from various developments surrounding the May 2024 elections.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson & Political Bureau Secretary for Policy and Research, 16 June 2024
