New ways for youth to be heard

June 16, 2008 – As the world remembers South Africa’s 1976 student uprising, one of its participants is urging young people to get involved in discussions about the issues they face today.

“Today’s leadership must lead by example and today’s youth will have clear lessons in what good leadership is about,” said Sibongile Mkhabela, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.

On June 16, 1976 Mkhabela was a student at Naledi High School in Soweto and a member of the South African Students’ Movement. SASM helped organise the protests against increasing repression in South Africa and the enforced teaching of black students in the Afrikaans language.

“The battle for us had gone beyond just being anti-Afrikaans, as a policy dispute. The situation had escalated to questioning the legality and legitimacy of the government of the day,” she said. “It took young and brave hearts of June 16, 1976 to make the point and the country was never going to be the same thereafter.”

Mkhabela joined thousands of students as they took to the streets armed only with placards and were met by police bullets. Hundreds were killed as the protests swept across South Africa. The events marked a turning point in South Africa’s history and swelled the ranks of young people who left the country for military training.

“The situation was typical of a people who had reached a point of no return. Neither death, detentions and shootings nor any form of intimidation could stop that movement to install a new order,” Mkhabela said.

Nelson Mandela, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment 12 years earlier, heard about the uprising only in August, when a new prisoner brought the news to Robben Island. He issued a statement which was released by the ANC in Zambia in 1980. “The verdict is loud and clear: apartheid has failed. Our people remain unequivocal in its rejection. The young and the old, parent and child, all reject it. At the forefront of this 1976/77 wave of unrest were our students and youth. They come from universities, high schools, and even primary schools. They are a generation whose whole education has been under the diabolical design of the racists to poison the minds and brainwash our children into docile subjects of apartheid rule. But after more than 20 years of Bantu Education the circle is closed and nothing demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of apartheid as the revolt of our youth.”

Coming from a background in which children had “no opportunity to enjoy the innocence of our childhood”, Mkhabela today works for children in the name of Nelson Mandela to help create a world “that simply allows children to be children”.

One of the highlights of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund’s celebrations of Mr Mandela’s 90th birthday this year is the Youth Parliaments the Fund has organised which are taking place on June 16 and July 9.

“I will listen to the young people of Southern Africa through the ‘Youth in Parliament’ sessions hosted by the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and I will respond to the issues they raise, which are, in so many ways, different to the challenges of my youth,” said Mkhabela.

She encouraged young people to participate in the parliaments and other platforms available to them “so that their voices are heard and result in positive actions that change the way society treats its children”.

“The Parliaments are intended to deepen democracy and democratic values among young people. We fought too hard not to protect this democracy by passing the baton to the younger generation.”