According to the historical record, in September 1976, three months after Soweto rose, more than five hundred schoolchildren from St Boniface, Tshireleco and Barkley Road High marched on the Transvaal Road police station, and for three days police answered them with batons and teargas in the streets of Galeshewe. Kimberley’s children had joined a national rebellion. Their names were never printed beneath a famous photograph, but their courage was no smaller for it.
Fifty years later, Sol Plaatje University stands in the city where they marched, and on Thursday, 30 July 2026, it will ask a harder question than most commemorations dare to raise: what did that generation actually win, and what do we still owe them?
The SPU Youth Month Dialogue, held under the theme Class of ’76: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Soweto Uprising and Consolidating our Blueprint for the Next 50 Years, refuses the comfort of nostalgia. The uprising of 1976 broke the myth that Black South Africans had accepted apartheid, and it helped bring a democratic state into being. Yet the young people who fill this university’s lecture halls today have inherited a paradox their grandparents did not live to see resolved. They hold political freedom without economic freedom. They can vote, but many cannot find work. They carry constitutional rights they often struggle to realise in practice.
This dialogue puts that paradox on the table and asks a generation to answer for it. Facilitated by Dr Jako Bezuidenhout, a historian in the Faculty of Humanities, the conversation moves deliberately from the streets of 1976 to the pressures of now: economic precarity and youth unemployment among the highest in the world, the fight for access to higher education that runs from the school walkouts of ’76 to the fees movements of the last decade, mental health and gender-based violence on campus, and the particular isolation of young people in the Northern Cape, far from the industry hubs and networks that decide who gets ahead.
What gives the evening its weight is who is doing the talking. The panel is not a row of visiting experts. It is SPU’s own.
Two of the university’s graduates return to the platform. Pelonomi Itumeleng, an award-winning educator, author and founder of the Burgundy Collective, a national finalist in the 2025 South African National Teaching Awards and a YALI and SUSI alumna, has built a career turning literacy and creative learning into opportunity for young people. Kagisano Sylvester Molawa, a data and insight analyst who moved from an SPU data science degree into industry and doctoral study, represents the future of work the dialogue interrogates, and the proof that it is reachable from Kimberley.
Beside them sit three of SPU’s own History Honours students, a detail heavy with meaning at a commemoration of a student uprising. Damain Jansen, from Colesberg, is a historian, entrepreneur and civic advocate who tutors school learners and has led a community neighbourhood watch. Gerswin van Niekerk, a first-generation graduate from Hopetown, is President of the SPU Student Representative Council and a member of the national executive of the South African Union of Students. Nontokozo Mbele, also a first-generation graduate, uses oral history to recover the voices of ordinary communities written out of the official archive, precisely the work of remembering that Galeshewe’s marchers still need done for them.
If the Class of ’76 wrote the blueprint for political liberation, this dialogue asks what the non-negotiable blueprint for the next fifty years must be, and it puts that question to the very generation that will have to answer it.
The event takes place at the SPU South Campus Hall, 50 Reservoir Road, New Park, Kimberley, from 17:00 to 19:30, and will be livestreamed for those who cannot attend in person. Join the conversation online at https://bit.ly/4wtKK1v.
The greatest tribute is not to remember the youth of 1976, but to ensure that fifty years from now, another generation does not have to ask why they are still waiting.
#SPUYouthMonth #YouthReset50 #MySPU
