Each June 16, we reprise our remembrance of the Soweto Uprising. We return to the haunting images of 1976 not only to honour the courage of the youth who rose up against injustice, but also to ask difficult, often uncomfortable questions about the state of education and social justice in South Africa today.
We bow our heads, quote Steve Biko, remember Hector Pieterson, and speak in solemn tones about freedom. But beneath this ritualised remembrance, in classrooms across the country – the very battlegrounds of 1976 – the foundations of injustice remain disturbingly intact.
Nearly 50 years after the Soweto Uprising, we must confront a hard truth: South Africa’s education system remains structurally rooted in colonial and apartheid logic. Yes, the signage of apartheid has been removed. The language of the curriculum has shifted. The word transformation appears prominently in policy documents.
But the philosophical architecture, the very logic that shaped and continues to shape our schooling, remains steeped in coloniality. We did not rebuild the system from the ground up. Instead, we covered the cracks with cosmetic reforms, while ignoring the deep rot at its core.
The post-apartheid state has invested billions in education: building schools, training teachers, and integrating technology. Yet educational outcomes remain starkly unequal. Literacy levels are declining. Socioeconomic disparities persist.
And increasingly, learners feel alienated from what they are taught. The question is no longer “how much are we spending?” but rather, “what vision is guiding our investment?”
As the late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Education is never neutral. It is always a function of the kind of society we want.” And therein lies our dilemma. We have failed to ask, in genuinely African terms: What kind of society are we trying to build? What kind of human being are we trying to cultivate?
Had we asked these questions honestly, we would have to acknowledge that the system was never designed to affirm the African child – instead, it was designed to alienate them. Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of Bantu Education, made this explicit: the aim was not ignorance, but subordination. The goal was to mould black African learners into instruments of an anti-black economy: obedient, decontextualised and denied full human dignity.
Today, this process continues under different guises. The dominance of English, and the language of “access”, “efficiency” and “standardisation” serve as smokescreens for an untransformed system.
As Lwazi Lushaba argues, transformation is not about inviting the oppressed into colonial structures, it is about dismantling those structures entirely. Simphiwe Sesanti puts it more plainly: education in Africa must be rooted in African knowledge systems, not superficially adorned with cultural symbols, but fundamentally reimagined.
The current curriculum still treats black African identity as a problem to be managed. Learners encounter themselves through distorted lenses: as passive victims of history, as poor but resilient, or as cultural artefacts within a globalised world. This creates a disconnection from learning because the deeper assumptions shaping education in South Africa continue to reflect Western paradigms.
The late Kwasi Wiredu offered an alternative: conceptual decolonisation. This is not about token changes, but a radical shift in the frameworks we use to think. We cannot decolonise the curriculum while maintaining the very ideologies that diminish African ways of knowing. We must ask: What counts as knowledge? What is truth? Who is allowed to speak and in what language?
Language remains one of the most visible failures of the democratic era. Despite official commitments to multilingualism, English remains the gatekeeper. Learners are often subtly, or even overtly, rewarded for distancing themselves from their mother tongues.
Yet, as Mamokgethi Setati and Jill Adler have shown in their work on mathematics classrooms, language is more than a communication tool, it is a way of seeing, knowing, and being. Teaching mathematics or science in a foreign language does not merely slow comprehension; it fragments learners’ cognitive and cultural identity. It teaches them that their home languages are suitable for jokes and prayers, but not for physics or philosophy.
This is the silent work of coloniality. It does not need to outlaw isiXhosa or Sesotho. It only needs to convince children that these languages are unfit for serious intellectual thought. And in doing so, it teaches them to doubt the value of their own minds.
That is why Molefi Kete Asante’s call for Afrocentricity is so urgent. Afrocentricity is not nostalgia. It is a reorientation of knowledge production. It demands that African learners are not peripheral observers, but central agents in shaping what knowledge is and how it should be taught.
This echoes economist Samir Amin’s call for economic delinking from the Global North. In education, we need a similar form of epistemic delinking, a refusal to accept European thought as the universal standard. This also means taking seriously the warnings of J Ndlovu-Gatsheni, who speaks of the “coloniality of being”: the lingering effects of colonialism on how we imagine ourselves and each other long after the colonisers have left.
So what are we really commemorating this Youth Day? If we are still schooling our youth into silence, into shame, into intellectual subjugation, then we are not honouring the legacy of 1976, we are betraying it.
This moment calls for more than memorial lectures, themed assemblies and hashtags. It calls for rupture. For refusal. For a radical reimagining of education not as a pathway into someone else’s world, but as a means of reclaiming our own.
We must summon the courage to set aside borrowed tools and begin building with the raw materials of our own histories, languages, and philosophies. Only then, when we begin to rebuild education from the ground up on foundations that affirm African life and thought, can we truly say that we remember. DM