Youth Day – South Africa

June 16

With the coming of summer, many students are struck with a debilitating illness known as cantgotoschoolitis. Symptoms may include inability to pay attention in class, wandering eyes, and an overactive imagination.

With students yearning so badly to get out of class, it’s hard to believe that on this day in 1976, many young students gave their lives fighting just to receive a fair and equal education.

In 1953, the white Apartheid government of South Africa passed the Bantu Education Act, which created a curriculum intended to reduce the aspirations and self-worth of the country’s black students.

As the Minister of Native Affairs and future Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd explained,

“When I have control of native education I will reform it so that Natives will be taught from childhood to realise that equality with Europeans is not for them…” (Apartheid South Africa, John Allen)

The supposed benefit of the Act was that it increased the number of black students able to attend school; the reality was that it provided no additional resources for the expansion. As a result, by 1975 the government was spending R644 per white student and R42 per black student.

The final straw came in the 1970s when the Apartheid government announced instruction would no longer take place in South Africa’s many native languages, but only in English and Afrikaans.

As one student editorial proclaimed:

“Our parents are prepared to suffer under the white man’s rule. They have been living for years under these laws and they have become immune to them. But we strongly refuse to swallow an education that is designed to make us slaves in the country of our birth.” (South Africa in Contemporary Times)

The conflict came to a head on June 16, 1976 when a group of students held a protest against the educational system in Soweto. When students refused to disperse, police unleashed tear gas. Students responded by throwing rocks; police, by firing bullets. At least 27 students were killed in the massacre, including a 12 year-old boy named Hector Pieterson.

A string of protests and riots engulfed the region. June 1976 is considered one of the most divisive and tragic months in South African history.

After the fall of the Apartheid government in the 1990s, South Africa chose to dedicate June 16 as Youth Day, in memory of those who died in the Soweto Riots, and those who devoted their lives to the long struggle for equal education and the abolition of apartheid.

Swami Vivekananda & Youth Day

January 12

The glory of Krishna is not that he was Krishna, but that he was the great teacher of Vedanta…Persons are but the embodiments, the illustration of principles. If the principles are there, the persons will come by the thousands and millions.

But if the principle is lost and forgotten and the whole of national life tries to cling round a so-called historical person, woe unto that religion, danger unto that religion!

Swami Vivekananda

Over a third of the 1 billion+ Indian population is under 15. Two-thirds are under 30. So when this country celebrates Youth Day, you better pay attention.

The United Nations and much of the world celebrates Youth Day on August 12, but India chooses to celebrate on January 12, the birthday of Indian scholar and teacher Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda was an activist for the common people and the Spiritual Ambassador of India to the West during the late 19th century.

Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda caused a spiritual earthquake in the U.S. when he spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago 1893. This was at a time when Hindus could be “outcast” simply by crossing the Atlantic.

One witness said: “No photograph or description can give a correct idea of the power of his eyes. They were wonderful. Like the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s famous people he ‘held you by the eye.’” (A. Srinivasa Pai)

One of the most powerful principles he taught and lived was that of “Jiva is Shiva,” that each individual is divinity itself. He believed that no one is truly free until all are truly free, even to the extent that personal salvation be secondary to helping others achieve salvation. He coined the term daridra narayana seva — serving God through less privileged human beings. His teachings heavily influenced the young Mahatma Gandhi.

Vivekananda was not without opponents. He believed that science and observation were the basis of religion, and thus religion taken on faith alone was the equivalent of superstition.

“I would rather have every one of you be rank atheists than superstitious fools, for the atheist is alive and you can make something out of him. But if superstition enters, the brain is gone…”

http://www.eaglespace.com/spirit/workbeforeus2.php

He espoused the revolutionary idea that religion be based on direct personal experience, rather than pure faith.

Religion is not going to church, or putting marks on the forehead, or dressing in a peculiar fashion. You may paint yourselves in all the colours of the rainbow, but if the heart has not been opened, if you have not realised God, it is all vain.

Vivekananda died on July 4, 1902, just shy of his 40th birthday. Today his memory serves as an inspiration to young people throughout India and the world.

If you have lost your wealth, you have lost nothing;

if you have lost your health, you have lost something;

if you have lost your character, you have lost everything.

Swami Vivekananda

More Words of Swami Vivekananda