About Youth Day (16 June 2024)

Youth Day - 16 June - was previously known as Soweto Day.

In 1975 protests started in African schools after a directive from the previous Bantu Education Department that Afrikaans had to be used on an equal basis with English as a language of instruction in secondary schools.

The issue however, was not so much the Afrikaans as the whole system of Bantu education which was characterised by separate schools and universities, poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms and inadequately trained teachers.

On the 16th June in 1976, more than 20 000 pupils from Soweto began a protest march. In the wake of clashes with the police, and the violence that ensued during the next few weeks, approximately 700 hundred people, many of them youths, were killed and property destroyed.

Youth Day commemorates these events.

Getaways over public holidays and during nationwide events are in high demand, so accommodation often books up quickly for these periods, and often long in advance. Please be sure to secure your accommodation well in advance if you are travelling when one of these takes place.

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Nationwide Events and Public Holidays

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