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.