19/06/2026
Ungakapheli nje uJune, nantu udaba ngezansi
#16 June 2026
How do you change a language of instruction for all black learners in a country?
You take teachers who know the ‘new’ language of instruction and instruct them to teach the black learners all subjects whether or not they understand the content that they are instructed to teach.
Get it? No?
Let’s try again
Take an Afrikaans teacher who teaches Afrikaans because he does not know Math and take a Math teacher who teaches Math and only did Afrikaans to scrape through High School, not to be conversant with the language and never to look back to the language ever again. The Afrikaans teacher is forced to teach Wiskunde (some of you need a translator) and the Math teacher is forced to work on improving her Afrikaans. The learners are forced to learn foreign concepts in a language that they are not conversant in and taught by someone who is good in Afrikaans but can’t decode any Math concepts in a meaningful way. It’s a right royal mess that will require a change of an entire generation of learners and teachers before the system can revert to some semblance of effective teaching and learning. In this milieu, quality education is only for the select few, these few were defined by their melanin content.
To add insult to this already egregious and gaping wound, remember the fact that the education being taught to these Bantus was intended to teach them to know their place in society and not to be too ambitious about their social mobility.
Let us not forget that the march that we commemorate on June 16 was a demand for better quality education. The first step was to refuse to accept being taught in a language that they did not understand by teachers who’s only teaching skill was speaking the ‘new’ language of instruction and not the Wiskunde that they were instructed to teach.
They marched and the then evil apartheid government killed many of them.
In 1994, 18 years after this march for better quality education, we celebrated the dawn of democracy. We had a new government that, we believed cared for the historically disadvantaged and would turn the tide of quality education for the children of the survivors of the 1976 violence and the survivors of the gutter education.
In 2021, 45 years after this march and 27 years after the dawn of democracy, we were shocked to find that our education system had gone full circle. A Progress in International Reading Literacy Study found that 81% of grade 4 learners are unable to read for comprehension. In an education system where grades 1 to 3 are meant for learners to learn to read and the remainder of the grades are meant for learners to read to learn, this is an unmitigated disaster. Add to this a world where machines can learn and assimilate copious amounts of information in a few seconds, this spells a plan for a whole generation of learners to be left behind. The school system becomes a place for nurturing hopelessness under unmet expectations. Again, strangely, only a lucky few are exposed to quality education.
In 2025, 49 years after the historical march and 31 years after the dawn of democracy, one of the interventions devised by the democratic government was to pass a law that made it easier for black students to have access to … wait for it … schools that used Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. The only rider being that these schools should not make the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction compulsory.
On the 50th anniversary of the student protests of 1976, it is important to remember that quality education was seen by these students as a non-negotiable. The current state of education is a spit in the face of the 1976 generation and their struggle that we are commemorating.
We aptly dubbed June 16 “Youth Day”. If our democracy cannot give the youth hope, they will have good reason to listen to charlatans with a gift of the garb shouting slogans that repeat the legitimate grievances of the many and use electoral democracy to establish authoritarianism. We will not be the first country to be afflicted by this debilitating scheme of charlatans.
