One of the commendable and often overlooked facts about the youth of 1976 and the Young Lions generation of the 1980s is that they did not wait for a Messiah to emerge from somewhere to free them from the yoke of apartheid.
While advocating and pushing for the release of Nelson Mandela and his jailed comrades, the youth took up the spear of freedom on their own, waking the elders from a slumber that had, since the mid-1960s, after Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to life imprisonment, threatened to normalise apartheid as an accepted system of government.
Today, 50 years after their courageous march, we can only speculate what the pages of South African history would look like had that generation not taken up the struggle themselves.
It is an overly worrying thought to consider, especially given that with age, there seems to come a certain wariness that leads to a softer approach towards advocating for change.
But with the innocence and impatience of youth comes a devil-may-care attitude that fuels defiance without worrying too much about the aftermath, so long as the point is made.
In June 2026, South African youth live in a democratic state, thanks to the bravery of the 1976 generation who dared to challenge the might of the apartheid state machinery, with its heavily armed police and military.
Thanks to their refusal to accept the miserable conditions of the lives they were subjected to and which their parents seemed to have accepted as an ordinary, normal way of life.
Yet the fruit of democracy, so inviting and full of promise in its infancy, is turning out to be thorny, somewhat coarse, bitter and unpalatable for the current generation of youth.
In its Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) revealed that 4.7 million youth were unemployed and that another 10.6 million were outside the labour force.
The authority further advised that “while the national unemployment rate stood at 32.7% in Q1 2026, the burden was disproportionately carried by the youth, with those aged 15-24 facing the highest unemployment rate at 60.9%, followed by those aged 25-34 at 40.6%.”
The authority painted an even more worrying picture, saying that “young people are not only more likely to be unemployed but are also far less likely to be in employment relative to their share of the working-age population.”
Even more concerning, Stats SA noted that “absorption and participation rates continue to be lower than those of adults, while their unemployment rate remains significantly higher, creating a persistent disadvantage for the youth”.
According to another report by Stats SA, The Social Profile of South African Youth: A Decade in Review, published in February 2025, approximately 21 million young people accounted for 33.1% of the country’s population.
This, it said, underscored their significant role in shaping the nation’s social and economic landscape. It further acknowledged that between 2014 and 2024, the youth population grew by 2.3%, while the overall population increased by 13.9%.
South Africa’s youth are defined as individuals aged 15 to 34.
According to the African Union, Africa has the youngest population in the world, with more than 400 million people aged 15 to 35 years.
Curiously though, the Parliamentary Monitoring Group reveals that only 8.5% of parliamentary seats in South Africa’s seventh Parliament are held by youth, which translates to only 33 out of the total 387 occupied seats.
The highest proportion of seats, 26.9%, is held by individuals aged between 45 and 54, followed by the age group 55-64 at 26.6%.
Furthermore, says the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, 23 of the youth MPs in the National Assembly are serving in the national legislature for the first time, while 10 have prior experience in the previous Parliament and only one youth MP, Tsakane Shiviti of the ANC, chairs a parliamentary committee.
Shiviti is the chairperson of the parliamentary portfolio committee on science, technology and innovation. This raises the obvious and logical question — are the youth underrepresented in Parliament by choice or by design? Where are the other Shivitis taking a lead in Parliament, civil society, scientific research, political and social activism, healthcare, mining and local government? Have they consciously and deliberately abdicated their responsibility to take the lead in shaping the future of a country that is populated mostly by youth and whose population is getting younger and younger?
Maybe the youth of 2026 are eager and willing to lead but perhaps their voices and efforts are being suppressed and held back by a society and system that still doubts the capabilities of youth leadership and prefers the safety of the saying ‘with age comes wisdom’.
It would be worth taking a leaf from the generation of 1976 on this score.
In the absence of elders who were either imprisoned, forced into exile, murdered or subdued into submission by the apartheid state, Tsietsi Mashinini and his generation chose not to wait for a Messiah to come and lead their revolution.
Barely out of their teens, they chose to embark on a path that was then unthinkable: open defiance of the state.
In the decade leading up to 1976, the state had become increasingly violent in its suppression of opposition to its racist policies, which were becoming ever tighter.
Deaths in detention of opponents of apartheid increased; bannings, jailings and the suppression by force of open defiance became the state’s normal weapons.
The cabinet poured more money into state security, tightened laws to empower its security agents and forces to quash any form of activity that sought to undermine or challenge the state’s increasing enforcement of apartheid.
This was only 16 years after Sharpeville. Nelson Mandela and his comrades, sentenced to life imprisonment after the Rivonia Trial in 1964, were just names mentioned in whispers among a populace threatened into silent submission.
Robert Sobukwe was serving a banning order in far-away Kimberley after his release from Robben Island following his arrest on 21 March 1960, the day South African police shot and killed 69 people, most of them in the back, during a peaceful protest against pass laws, which effectively stripped black South Africans of their citizenship.
Elsewhere, in institutions of higher learning such as Turfloop in the Northern Transvaal, Steve Biko and his comrades in the Black Consciousness Movement were planting seeds of awakening from the slumber brought about by the events of the early 1960s.
Yet in Soweto and other townships across South Africa, youngsters such as Tsietsi daily witnessed the onslaught of apartheid on their parents, reduced to boys and girls in service of the white master.
They, too, felt it in inadequately equipped classrooms, through an education system that merely prepared them for lives as servants under the same system that crushed the aspirations of their parents.
Those who had challenged the system in the early 1960s had disappeared from the townships — in jail, like Mandela and Sisulu; under banning orders, like Sobukwe and Mothopeng; or in exile, like Tambo, Leballo and Kgosana.
Apartheid repression had condemned many to angry submission, drowning their sorrows in derelict, rowdy state-owned beer halls, while political activism had been silenced through other means: religion, sport, liquor and a deadly dose of Western cultural consumption.
Little effort was spared by the state to ensure that oppressed Africans forgot who they really were and most importantly, that they were living under a system that did not want them to progress beyond a particular level economically, academically and politically.
Apart from clandestine meetings with veterans of the struggle, such as Joe Gqabi and Zephania Mothopeng and others who had served time on Robben Island, Tsietsi and his generation hardly had any leaders.
Often, their attempts to seek advice and assistance from elders were met with rebukes such as: ‘If you go on like this, you will end up in jail like Mandela.’
Trying to establish who exactly Mandela was, what he stood for and why his name evoked such fear among elders was asking for even more trouble.
But even in the absence of leaders such as Mandela, the youth of 1976 refused to cower.
They refused to wait for a Messiah to save them from the yoke of oppression delivered and enforced through a strange language: Afrikaans.
When they took to the streets of Soweto on the morning of 16 June 1976, they may not have appreciated the enormity and significance of their courage or how it would change the course of history.
Just 18 years after the historic June 16 uprising, millions of South Africans went to the polls for the first time, bringing an end to decades of oppressive white minority rule.
The courageous efforts of Tsietsi and his comrades in 1976 unleashed new energy, a wave of defiance that continued to gain momentum throughout the 1980s, despite increased efforts by the apartheid state to violently crush such resistance.
It is public knowledge that many paid with their lives along this march; many disappeared, while others were maimed and scarred for the rest of their lives.
The youth of 2026 face no repressive government. They face no threat of jail, beatings, harassment or exile should they rise up, take the lead and begin to have a say in the systems that govern their lives.
South Africa needs them in municipalities rendered dysfunctional by older comrades; in state and public institutions on the brink of collapse because of corruption, ineptitude and indifference; and in communities ravaged by substance abuse, poverty and the resulting moral degeneration.
Like Tsietsi and his generation, who realised there was no point in waiting for a Messiah, it is time today’s youth realised that they are not the future; they are the present, with the power and responsibility to shape the future.
Lucas Ledwaba is the editor and publisher of Mukurukuru Media and the author of A Desire to Return to the Ruins, a look at the contentious issues of land reform and restitution in post-apartheid South Africa; Broken & Broken: The Shameful Legacy of Gold Mining in South Africa; and We Are Going to Kill Each Other Today: The Marikana Story.