From a student who helped plan the 1976 march from his school in Soweto, to a playwright who spent months inside the archives and still bursts into tears, Muhammad Hussain asked four people who have grappled deeply with June 16 the same three questions. Their answers reveal an uncomfortable truth.
Fifty years after pupils in Soweto rose up against apartheid, reigniting a liberation struggle that would eventually bring down one of history’s most brutal regimes, South Africa marks the anniversary of June 16 with concerts, speeches and a public holiday.
But what does the day actually mean now, and have we lost the plot?
News24 spoke to four people who have each grappled with that question: a student leader who was there on the day, a journalist who witnessed it, the director of a new theatre production about it, and a historian who has spent his career studying it.
We asked all of them the same three questions: What does June 16 mean to you? How has it evolved over your lifetime? And have we collectively lost the meaning of June 16?
Their answers reveal how the essence of June 16 has been distorted, captured, lost and changed over the years.
Ambassador Mahlodi Sam Muofhe
SA Ambassador to South Sudan and a former student leader during the 16 June Uprising.
Over the years, the meaning of June 16 has been distorted.
We decided that we’ve had enough of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, and that was the trigger that mobilised us as students.
Bantu education was meant to domesticate us as black people, and white education was meant to whitewash white students.
We have lost the meaning of June 16. People who are talking about June 16 today will talk as if they know what we wanted and they don’t.
Today, our leaders will be saying the youth of ’76 fought for jobs. That’s not the correct messaging. As the youth of ’76, we wanted quality education, which is lagging behind even today.
If we were true to ourselves, we would have kept the history of June 1976 alive, especially after 1994. But we needed to appease others. That is why June 16 is called Youth Day.
Max du Preez
Journalist and editor who worked for Beeld on 16 June 1976 in Soweto.
I remember that morning, driving to Soweto. It was a cold, dry winter, and I was playing an ABBA song in my car, wondering what I was going to do that night because I had a new girlfriend.
A few hours later, I stood across from a bunch of young people, many almost my age, and I looked at them, and they walked into bullets. That was the end of normal for me.
Since 1994, it has become a public holiday like any other day – a day off for a braai and a drink.
I think we lost the real meaning and significance of that moment. I found it again while researching and writing The End of Normal.
I get annoyed at how it has been commemorated now. Every year, the ANC organises these events, and people jump up and down. I think it’s time to say, forget about the politicians. Let’s go back to the human element.
For a long time, the ANC pretended June 16 was their initiative. It had nothing to do with them. Oliver Tambo himself said they had no idea it was coming. If any politician had anything to do with it, it was Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, because Black Consciousness fired up these young people.
Yes, we have lost the meaning of June 16. We have not lived up to what those young people deserved.
What would Hector Pieterson say today as a 60 or 65-year-old man? Was that worth it? Did we make the most of it? I think we messed it up a bit.
My overwhelming sense is that those young people demanded dignity. Did we give that? How dignified can you be if you live in a vast squatter camp and you eat scraps today?
That’s our failure. That’s all our failure. And it makes me sad.
Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni
Writer and director of “Rise ’76 – The story of 16 June”
Since September 2025, my life has been June 16, quite literally, and it’s been completely flipped upside down.
My relationship with June 16 before that was very casual, much like many young South Africans. It would come around, and I’d have a moment of “oh my gosh, yes, it’s June 16”. Then a post would pop up on social media, I’d like it and share it, and I’d go on about my day.
I was speaking to my partner, saying: “We’re so flippant about what June 16 means in this country.” The manner of the violence and the pain to normal people like you and me that I have seen, heard and read multiple times over the past few months [researching and writing the play] has completely changed my view.
READ | REVIEW: Rise ‘76 tells the story of the Soweto uprising through a distinctly human lens
It’s still so traumatic for many people, 50 years later. I still burst into tears about this.
I came across a testimony from a parent who, on 17 June – the day after – attended a meeting where parents discussed the casualties. He said he felt they had failed their children. That they should be the ones to take the bullets, not their children. That they should be ashamed of themselves.
A few years later, they interviewed him again – do you think we should celebrate June 16 as a country? He was still of the same opinion. He said: “Absolutely not. June 16 is not something to celebrate.”
That’s the sentiment I believe now.
Collectively, I think we love to put these children on a pedestal, which they absolutely deserve, but that softens our lens. Making them heroes takes away the fact that their childhood was taken from them. They had to become the heroes of this country when they should have just been children.
I would love for us to remember that it was not just an uprising, it was a massacre.
Uprising softens it. We should remember it as a massacre where South Africa’s children were ultimately killed for fighting for their rights.
Professor Noor Nieftagodien
Wits University historian and convenor of the 1976@50 Conference.
I was not involved in ’76; I was far too young. By the time I was in high school in the 1980s, we used to have lectures, events and pickets on June 16.
From an early age, 1976 stood out, especially for people like me in black schools, as an example of the activism, heroism and determination of students who, like me in my mid-teens, were prepared to challenge Bantu education and the system as a whole.
In a sense, the 1976 Uprising was the beginning of the end of apartheid. It was powerful, evocative, symbolically crucial.
It was entirely right for June 16 to be made a public holiday. However, by calling it Youth Day, and the way it has been celebrated, the meaning of June 16 has, in a sense, lost its political meaning. There’s no acknowledgement of the heroism of the young women and men who sacrificed their lives. Celebrating Youth Day, then, has very little meaning in that case.
One of the changes, ideologically, was that Black Consciousness was eclipsed by the Congress movement. A related issue was that the ANC began to appropriate 1976 as part of its history of liberation. That is problematic because it marginalises the agency and activism of all people, particularly women and young people.
1976 was not orchestrated by any of the main political parties. The ANC and PAC were in exile and completely marginal in what happened. Young people organised themselves, largely inspired by Black Consciousness.
What the students of ’76 did, which is in danger of being lost today, is that they tried to unite black working class people. African and coloured youth worked together. Students were joined by workers. The instinct was to unite against a common enemy.
What we see today is fragmentation – xenophobic, Afrophobic politics, gender-based violence, a rise in ethnic politics – all aimed at dividing poor people and letting them struggle against one another.
