Chairperson, in five days' time it shall be exactly 32 years since the 1976 uprising. All our people agree that this day was more than just an event. It was a heroic feat that turned around the historical course of events in our country and ushered in a new era of struggle. As a result of that uprising, the eighties were to be a different kind of period. The vulnerability of the regime was exposed and its inevitable defeat ceased to be inconceivable.
It is correct that our country should every year commemorate that uprising and pay tribute to the young patriots who, on that day, committed a feat way above their shoulders, as well as millions of others who followed in their footsteps in the years that were to follow. Because of their magnificent bravura they laid a solid foundation for the youth of the eighties to raise the level of the struggle even higher and shed all fear of the regime and its forces of repression. Even when the regime unleashed its naked brutality in what became the most brutal decade of repression, it had, in their eyes and hearts, lost its initial invincibility.
Time and again the demands of the struggle would place upon the youth unprecedented responsibilities and called on them to commit heroic feats that would help propel the struggle forward and resolve the most urgent and acute problems of our people. During this entire period of the struggle, both before and after 1976, the youth acted with the knowledge and conviction that their struggle was part of a people's war against racial tyranny and their interests as young people were integral and similar to those of the people as a whole.
They knew that only victory over apartheid would resolve their most fundamental yearning for a better and quality education and empowerment. The youth became the dynamic force of the struggle and its sharp end. Their patriotism reached new levels when they were engaged in the process, together with their people, to resolve the most intractable problems created by the system of racial capitalism.
Over time they understood that the liberation of Africa constituted a single process and that consequently our struggle was one with that of Africa's independence from colonial bondage. Thus we were able to recognise our struggle's inner unity with the continent-wide revolution in Africa as well as the anticolonial and progressive struggle throughout the world and to regard our pursuit of the African Renaissance as inseparable from that of our national democracy.
Through our struggle we were able to develop a common identity, solidarity and patriotism with Africa. It was for this reason that Africa as a whole was prepared to bear the brunt of apartheid and support our struggle at immense cost to our economic and political stability.
Only a supreme act of patriotism and sense of nationhood could deliver as heroic a feat as that delivered by the 1976 uprising. The fact is that historical events do not occur accidentally or in a vacuum. Accordingly, 16 June 1976 was indubitably produced by the confluence of social conditions and political climate that made it happen.
Any group of youth that found themselves in the same conditions and facing the same challenges as the youth of Soweto in 1976 would more or less have produced the same feats of struggle. The youth of 1976 discovered their mission on June 16. As they embarked on that fateful march that day, they had no prior knowledge of the sheer magnitude of their actions both domestically and internationally. They did not know that they held the destiny of their country in their hands and that they were about to write their own history and etch the name of their generation permanently on the archives of our nation's history.
When, therefore, we commemorate this momentous occasion we are dared once more to pose the question: What does it mean to be young in the South Africa and Africa of today? What must the youth of today do both to emulate the heroism of the past as well as to raise the level of the struggle in view of the challenges of the moment? When we attempt to define what those events meant then and what they mean, or should mean, now we must not commit the often repeated error subtly to communicate the message to today's youth that they are nothing when compared to those of yesteryear; that they do not measure up to them.
The story is told that the youth of the past committed acts of heroism which the present generation of youth is failing to live up to. The past was great, they are told, and the elderly generation was, as youth, a much better breed whereas the present generation is a huge disappointment. It often sounds like a statement that seems to suggest to the youth today that if they were faced with similar challenges as in 1944, the 1950s, the 1960s, in 1976 or the 1980s they would run and hide. But is this true?
The question is: If Tsietsi Mashinini or Kgotso Seatlholo were 16 years old in 2008, how would they have behaved? Or, if today's youth were in high school in 1976 and faced with precisely the same political challenges that faced the youth of that year, how would they have reacted? What did the youth of the past have that intrinsically distinguished them from those of today and made them natural heroes?
It is thus simply unfair to accuse today's youth of not being like the youth of the past when the social conditions and political climate that shaped and informed their thinking and action just does not exist today. It would be equally absurd to accuse the youth of the past of having lacked the sophistication and complexity of today's youth. The struggles fought and the victory scored in the past must continue to be conveyed from generation to generation, but the lesson of those struggles must be clear: Each generation must discover its mission and fulfil it.
Asking today's youth to become captives of the past, no matter how glorious that past was, will inhibit their search for their own mission and make its discovery nigh impossible. Out of the seeming slumber of the present a new uprising must and will happen. The lesson of 1976 is that simply because it seems calm it does not mean that there is no storm gathering force so that when it strikes the wool of self-delusion will be wiped away.
Today's youth must be inspired to commit their own heroic feats of struggle and write their epic tales. The watershed of our struggle must become the pathways to the future not to the past. They must inspire the present and future generations successfully to summit the vicious mountains of their own time. Heroes and heroines do not simply belong to the past, but the difficult challenges of today will breed new heroes and heroines.
We cannot underscore enough the point that South Africa today faces enormous challenges that require comprehensive and targeted responses if we must reverse inequality, poverty and underdevelopment. This is even more difficult under the conditions of globalisation which reinforce the current global power relations and patterns of inequality and underdevelopment. The result is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
At the same time, both within countries and at a global level, there is a tendency towards increasing depoliticisation as witnessed by the youth's increasing loss of interest and disengagement in politics and political processes such as democratic elections and political institutions. There is a decline in political and social consciousness as well as a decline in solidarity with the poor, especially amongst the middle-class youth. Many among our youth are failing to define their role in the South Africa and Africa of today. This sounds like a paradox especially at a time when we say that we demand more democracy and participation in decision-making.
The youth must resist the temptation of becoming indifferent and to stand idly and watch while others are constructing their future for them. They have an obligation to care about their own future and what it will look like.
It is common, though, that as democracy becomes ensconced, people tend to think that their lives will go on without politics and government, and begin to care less about what types of governments they have and what policies they are pursuing. They simply get on with their lives and lose interest in politics and democracy.
The aim of the democratic process which includes participation is thus negated by this diminishing role of civil society. The democratic process is a negation of social exclusion and marginalisation. This is more relevant in the South Africa of today which must take into consideration the impact of international migration and the need, therefore, consistently to define and redefine relations between various groups within our nation state.
International migration poses a direct challenge to our understanding of how we define ourselves as a nation, both in relation to one another as well as in relation to Africa as our mother continent. South Africa is regarded as one of the countries with the largest inflows of regular and irregular migrants.
Recent scenes of xenophobic attacks have tested our claim of being Africans and how we define ourselves in relation to other African people. Given that international migration is a growing phenomenon globally, we can no longer avoid engaging with this challenge. In order to continue to expand our perspective and combat xenophobia - which has phenomenally damaged our relations with fellow Africans in our country and our continent when there could have been other socioeconomic factors that could have contributed to the recent incidents - we must rebuild the pride of the South African youth in being African, and their knowledge and understanding of, passion for and solidarity with Africa.
This cannot happen only through lectures and school subjects, important as these obviously are, but must be forged and fostered through conscious programmes of interaction and exchange which should include encouraging them to travel to and work in Africa as exchange volunteers or even solidarity workers.
The fact is that while most of our youth aspire to travel to and may even identify with Western Europe and the United States, very few of them expect that they will travel to Africa or even identify with her difficulties.
The fact is that there is little person-to-person interaction with youth of other African states, and South Africans are obsessed with negative Western myths and stereotypes about Africa and Africans.
We're welcoming of the whites and Europeans in a manner that we are not applying to Africans, because we believe that the latter are below us and substandard, hence when they are in South Africa they are here to steal our jobs. Yet there is so much we can learn from the immense entrepreneurial spirit of the African immigrants, the wealth of their culture and the enormity of their spirit and resilience.
Much of what we know about Africa is largely informed by a popular media steeped in Afro-pessimism. We spend too much time trying to find that which distinguishes us from the rest of Africa. We enjoy being patted on the back by the West and likened to it. We then get surprised when our likeness with Africa is laid bare as though Africa was not one continent and all Africans one people.
The question is: How does it help us and our pursuit to be different from the rest of Africa? How did it happen that the strong sense of African solidarity and identity we forged during the struggle has so easily and quickly been discarded? South Africans can never claim to be citizens of the world until they have claimed and asserted their Africanness. It is when we embrace our identity as Africans that we can be embraced by humanity as whole as part of itself. Our very struggle against apartheid was premised precisely on the reclaiming of our Africanness and our humanity. The youth must thus be taught both that South Africa is an African country in Africa and that Africa is bound by a common destiny. Thank you. [Applause.]