South Africa’s Soweto Uprising, sign of youth architects of history: Op-Ed

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The turning point in the history of both Türkiye and South Africa was due to the revolutions driven by young people.

Türkiye's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was part of the revolutionary movement of intellectuals, Young Turks, which inspired the founding values of the Turkish Republic.

Ataturk's leadership included language reforms that ensured the Turkish people had their own, easy to understand language based on their unique Turkish identity.

In the same way the South African youth of 1976 determined the future of South Africa when they were killed protesting against the apartheid government's decision for the usage of a language that did not belong to the native people, Afrikaans, as a language of instruction in schools.

The decision proceeded from the apartheid government's Bantu Education Act 47 of 1953, later named the "South African segregation law", which was basically aimed at limiting the education of black children so that would only assume inferior roles in society.

The fatal 1976 youth protests in Soweto echoed the words of one of South Africa's struggle leaders, Chief Albert Luthuli that, "The essence of development along your own lines is that you must have the right to develop, and the right to determine how you develop".

What the apartheid government was trying to do was to take away the right to development from the black people of South Africa, and further decide on how they were to be underdeveloped, and ultimately paralyse and assassinate their futures. One of the first children to be shot in on that day was 12 year old Hector Peterson; the photo of his lifeless body would later become a steady symbol of the June 16 protests, also called the "Soweto Uprising".

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