It is our turn to courageously repay the debt we owe to June 16 champions

The greatest debt we owe for our democracy and the freedom we enjoy, though not yet complete, is owed to the children and young people of this country.

- Thuli Madonsela

It was their audacious confrontation with the mighty apartheid state that strengthened the spines that had been weakened by the Sharpeville Massacre and the banning of the liberation movements in the 1960s.

It was their audacity and the martyrdom of some of them, most notably the 12-year-old Hector Pieterson, that re-energised the global anti-apartheid solidarity movement.

But have we honoured those children enough? Have we ensured that what they put their heads above the parapet for is enjoyed by them or at least their descendants?

I was a 13-year-old child on the morning of June 16. Though young and shielded by the distance of being at school in neighbouring Swaziland (now Eswatini), in 1976, I and many children felt the crushing weight of the egregious massacre of children our age and younger by the apartheid security forces.

Back at home for the August holidays, the streets hummed with an unspoken tension, the shock still palpable. Looking back years later, it occurred to me that it was June 16 that stole my Seventh-day Adventist-anchored childhood innocence. It was then that I began to understand what had necessitated the armed struggle.

The decision of the National Party to introduce Afrikaans as the language of instruction in African schools was not the worst element in the architecture of dispossession that had happened to us, our parents and ancestors. It was simply the last straw that broke the camel's back for the children and young people at the time.

The ubiquitous machinery of apartheid that was unleashed from 1948, culminating in the boiling point on June 16, 1976, followed years of apartheid-styled but not named dispossession, deprivation and oppression using the law under colonialism. In her book, Apartheid: Britain’s Bastard Child, Helene Opperman Lewis details the laws of dispossession, deprivation and oppression unleashed on Africans even before the Union of South Africa.