In honour of the African Child

| Tuesday June 15, 2010 00:00

It is significant that though apartheid had been an utterly unacceptable heresy for more than four centuries, it took young people - in one cataclysmic wave - to stand firm against it and set in motion a selfless campaign that would deliver the masses of South Africans from the evil of organised racial prejudice 18 years later.

It is also notable that the scene for this rebellion was what passed for a school in a 'township' functioning as a source of cheap labour for the benefit of South Africa's minority white population and its supporters in the West, especially Britain, the United States and Israel.

This underscores the role of education as an instrument of social change and young people as the vanguard of such change. In the case of South Africa, it was children as young as 13 who took on the might of apartheid.

It is important to note that taking on apartheid meant threatening - directly so - the interests of Western Europe and Zionist Israel whose industries depended on raw materials from South Africa and the rest of the African continent where Western capitalism extended its tentacles.

It meant standing in the way of the supply of strategic minerals - including uranium - that were vital to forming the military-industrial complex of the West against the Eastern bloc.  It also meant showing up the so-called 'invincibility of the white redoubt' for the sham that it was.   

In these propaganda stakes, it meant confronting Western news agencies that insisted on referring to the ANC, the PAC, SWAPO and the PLO as terrorist organisations even long after the UN had long recognised them as legitimate liberation movements.

Partly because the resistance began on a rather shambolic footing that day on June 16, 1976 many of the young people lost their lives and hordes were driven into exile in neighbouring countries and beyond. While this helped fill the ranks of the liberation movements, it also exposed the populations of these countries to the wrath of apartheid and its Western supporters.

To apartheid and its Western allies, it mattered little that these 'third-world  countries' had a legitimate right under international law to extend men, material and territory to the liberation movements and their young cadres.

Hence the so-called Cold War was often very hot in southern Africa where apartheid forces came in 'hot pursuit' and the internationalist forces of the Soviets and Cubans stood by the liberation movements.

In this conflagration, young people - merely children in many instances - stood firm and put a stop to the madness.  It is against this background that the then OAU designated June 16 the Day of the African Child.We would do well to honour this day by giving our children a good education and other things they deserve.

                                                                    Today's thought

     'I love children. I have three of my own, and I just love them to death. I'd do anything to educate a child.'

                                                             -Stephanie McIntosh