In Memory of SOWETO 1976!
Symbol of African Childhood for Freedom

Since June 16, 1991, the international community celebrates the Day of the African Child in remembrance of the hecatomb of Soweto.  On June 16, 1976, in the midst of the apartheid regime of South Africa, swarms of young people (thousands) protest peacefully in the streets of the suburbs of Soweto (24 km to the southwest of Johannesburg), to fight against the imposition of Afrikaans as the exclusive language vehicle of knowledge in the schools. Afrikaans is the language of the principal white community.  

Under the order "to restore order at all costs," the police force shot blindly on school youths. Following the riots that went on for months, hundreds of victims were counted. The whole country was under fire, mainly the townships that stood up against imposture. The symbol of   martyrdom, June 16, reaches far into consciences and replaces the role of African youth in the center of the fights for the respect of human dignity. Today, the chaotic situation of African societies weakens the statute of the African youth, which is the majority layer of the people of the continent.  

Subjected to early urban work, the African child also finds himself in wars, prostitution, human trafficking, vagrancy, street begging, etc. Plagued by chronic malnutrition, he is the prey of recurring affections that are resistant to all vaccination campaigns.  Stigmatization does not spare him when he is compared to witchcraft or that he is trailing some physical disabilities. African states do not take advantage of the entire African heritage, as far as taking care of the children is concerned.  

Caught in the middle of their civilization's values, youth policies are only limited, up to now, to introducing social reforms which do not call into question the ideological systems at the origin of the sufferings of African children.  The choice of Africa of the Independencies was to opt for a development depending on the old colonial powers. Attempts to bring local answers to the local problems of development, of a reunified homeland, shrouded the martyrs of the panafricanism.  

This is why, rapped in territories arbitrarily delimited by geopolitical intentions to turn Africa into an economic land for the expansion of industrialized countries, the African children are right to make their voice heard. Because their grandparents worked out yesterday all traditional pedagogies to prepare them to embrace the new world, anchored in salutary cultural marks.  

The failure is obvious and have offered to this youth only uncertainties of a world of consumption. In 2010, the food imports rose to $33 billion on a continent directed by 23 military States out of 53 countries and whipped by 55 coups d'état in just a few decades.

Incompetent  to suspend the wars, drought, epidemics, the spoliation of the mining, forest, halieutic resources, etc; the elder elites must depend on their younger generations to build the New Africanism, not for this people, but with this people and by this people of which more than 50% are under 16 years.  Let us request, so that the flame of Soweto be this sap which illuminates the way for a better fate of our youth.  O how much avid of justice, tolerance, democracy and fully blooming.