This year marks the 45th anniversary of the June 16 uprising, when in 1976 the youth of this country stood up against the system of Bantu education and confronted the oppressive, racist, apartheid regime. Designed by one of the founding fathers and architects of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, this education system was aimed at limiting access to education and economic opportunities for black people in general, particularly Africans. This education system, in Verwoerd’s words, was meant to reduce us to second-class subservient citizens whose role was to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. The brave youth of this country would have none of that.