Chairperson, hon Ministers and Deputy Ministers, hon Members of Parliament, our distinguished guests in the gallery and fellow young people of South Africa, 35 years ago, when students in Soweto started protesting for better education on 16 June 1976, the typical fascist tyranny in our country did not bother to listen to the grievances of these students or the people as a whole.
Instead, they unleashed brutality, with teargas, bombs and bullets being the only redress they could provide. These noble students were protesting against the enacted Bantu Education Act, which led to the establishment of the Black Education Department located within the Department of Native Affairs. The role of this department was to compile a curriculum that suited the nature and requirements of the black people.
The author of this legislation was none other than Dr Verwoerd himself, then Minister of Native Affairs, who defined the intention of the legislation as one that seeks to educate native blacks that equality with European whites is a phantom dream that can never be realised.
When the department of education issued its decree that Afrikaans was to become a language of instruction in schools, they were met with objections from young students who rejected being taught in the language of the oppressor. The rioting soon spread from Soweto to other towns on the Witwatersrand, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town and developed into the largest outbreak of violence that South Africa had ever experienced.
These were dedicated students who showed reckless disregard for their own safety in order to vent their frustrations against the evil system of apartheid. Former president of the ANC, President O R Tambo, concluded, and I quote:
There is no vocabulary to describe the nobility and the pathos of the conscious sacrifices that the black youth of South Africa have made to free themselves, their people and their country from forces determined to keep us forever their chattels.
Deputy Speaker, 35 years later, and as we celebrate the great strides we have made to defeat the tyranny of apartheid and its skewed policies that favoured the white minority, we have got to consolidate the gains of freedom as young people in current day South Africa. We need to do this through active participation in the economy and ensuring that, indeed, we achieve economic freedom in our lifetime.
History has imposed on us today the duty to occupy the forward trenches in the final assault on poverty, unemployment and ignorance. We should be able to identify the gap for development and actively pursue the objectives that seek to uplift our people and the renewal of our society.
Deputy Speaker, let me pause to pay tribute to the mother of the nation, Ma Albertina Sisulu, whose resilience and contribution to the struggle to free her people from the bondage of colonial rule and apartheid will never go unnoticed. As we commemorate youth month as a nation, we also celebrate her life well lived. We are proud to have been associated with her; but over and above that, we are proud to have had her in the leadership ranks of the