(16 Jun 2016) 40 years ago - June 16, 1976 - and anger at the compulsory use of Afrikaans in black schools in apartheid-era South Africa had reached boiling point.
10-thousand students marched in Johannesburg's Soweto township to express their opposition to the continued employment of the language of their white oppressors.
A violent confrontation with armed police followed, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 300 protestors. Hundreds more were killed as protests spread nationwide.
South Africa has changed hugely since then.
In 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, later winning the Nobel Peace Prize and becoming the country's first black president.
In 1994, blacks were finally granted the right to vote. And the despised "whites only" barriers fell.
But one of the organisers of the 1976 protest, then just 16 years old, said that reconciliation was an ongoing process.
Seth Mazibuko, who is today the head of the June 16 Youth Development Foundation, recalled "feeling the pain" of studying in a system "that was led by those who were oppressing" black students.
Detained without trial and imprisoned for years on Robben Island, where the late Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, Mazibuko said that years of suffering could not be cancelled out merely by the declaration of "reconciliation".
Although living conditions have improved, many blacks are still trapped in poor neighbourhoods, without electricity or running water in their homes.
And a new wave of student protests over fees charged for higher education show that the country remains starkly divided between the haves and have-nots.


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