JOHANNESURG–On June 16, 1976, African youths in Occupied Azania were massacred by the direct colonial government of South Africa. This date has become known and celebrated as Youth Day alias “June 16" in South Africa.
This is an analysis of the process that is often not justly documented. We have attended a meeting with the Youth Communist League and, despite ideological differences, have summed up our analysis of the event as such.
Although the June 16 massacre is attributed to have been inspired by Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and the African National Congress’ (ANC) organizational power, that was not the case at all.
This narative was only put forth once the ANC had came to power and they used this as a way to solidify their power and create a false national identity on now what makes up South Africa.
It must be understood that the ANC was born in 1912 as a bourgeois/negro-colonial assimilationist organization made of chiefs or children of chiefs—Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, for example.
This automatically led the ANC as an organization to have petty bourgeois aspirations sharing similar material interests to the South African colonial political parties of the time.
From the 1930s, these interests were enforced through institutional education in Europe.
This is the ANC. The ANC is not RECENTLY a sell-out organization. It ALWAYS was from its conception.
In opposition to the interests of the ANC stood the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) under Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Steve Bantu Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement.
At that time, both organizations demanded black power and unity with the rest of the African world internationally.
As the struggles of the peoples of the world increasingly threatened white power imperialism in the ‘60s, the U.S. FBI launched the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) designed to wipe out all revolutionary leadership throughout the world.
This was a response to imperialism being ideologically defeated by this very same revolutionary leadership of African people all over the world—Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, etc. So white power could only retaliate militarily.
As a result, in South Africa, Sobukwe was jailed and poisoned in the ‘60s and Biko was murdered by the State in the late ‘70s leading to African people in Occupied Azania losing our leadership and the ideological benefits that came from the education they were giving the masses.
Also in South Africa, all non-white political parties, revolutionary and neocolonial, were banned during this counterinsurgency assault.
Sobukwe and Biko knew that their enemy, imperialism, was international, and thus they made organizational contact with Africans struggling around the world like the African People’s Socialist Party.
Biko linked the Black Power Movement in the U.S. with the Black Consciousness Movement in Occupied Azania.
So with the wiping out of legitimate African leadership, a situation was created where Africans only acted spontaneously in resisting and challenging the South African government.
Even with little political education, the African masses—the youth in particular who were once forced to learn all their subjects in Dutch or “Afrikaans”—organized a powerful protest and uprising on June 16, 1976 in Soweto.
Armed with nothing more than improvised metallic dustbin lids as shields, homemade explosives and stones, the brave African youth challenged the South African apartheid State.
Although this massacre is typical of white power, this horrific mass murder of African youth exposed the true nature of imperialism to African people everywhere.
It shattered all the illusions Africans and other peoples of the world had about white power—including in Occupied Azania—and thus led to an intensified resistance against the South African government.
As a result, the 1980s saw an increase in guerrilla and armed struggle against South Africa’s direct colonial government.
The masses of Africans all over South Africa and outside of South Africa, such as Thomas Sankara, were targeting South Africa and tearing at the Dutch settler colonialist State of South Africa.
As a desperate attempt for survival, the South African imperialist government set up neocolonialism.
This was when it was decided that Nelson Mandela from that petty bourgeois ANC would be put up as the new face of South Africa in order to appease the masses of revolting Africans before we gained revolutionary consciousness.
This is why some newspapers in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s blurted out the secret that De Klerk had “set Mandela free.”
Neocolonialism is the last stage of imperialism
This is why Africans in Occupied Azania are dying daily from police brutality and police terror including the new drug nyaope being distributed by the South African Police Department to the young Africans here.
This is the crack that they have in the ghettos in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and all over South African cities. They are drugging our youth and criminalizing our youth in South Africa right now in 2014!
The South African government murdered the African youth in 1976. What stops it from doing it again in 2014 if the same conditions arise the world over?
And so the youth in Occupied Azania must build the African Socialist International.
Reject the concessions of the South African government. South Africa is built at the expense of African people everywhere!
Down with neocolonialism!
Build the African Socialist International!
