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CASSIEM KHAN of the Inqilab Collective reflects on 50 years of the 1976 Student Uprising.
Read, reflect, resist
As we mark the 50th anniversary of the June 16, 1976 student uprising, South African Muslims are best suited to ask the question the democratic state does not wish to answer: why, in 2026, are the children of this land still being denied the education their elders bled and died for?
The first word revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was Iqra — Read. This singular divine command establishes, as the very foundation of Islam, that the pursuit of knowledge is as much a revolutionary act, an act of worship, a sacred obligation, and a human right inseparable from human dignity. To deny that right, to distort it, to render it inaccessible, is therefore not merely a political failure. It is a moral crime of the deepest order.
Dr Ali Shariati, the Islamic revolutionary thinker and philosopher, drew a critical distinction between the Islam of the dispossessed, the true Prophetic Islam, liberatory Islam, and the Islam of the court, the Islam acceptable to the ruling class, where government is weaponised to legitimise power and pacify the poor.
South African Muslims must apply this diagnostic lens to the post-apartheid state in all respects. Are we as Muslims presenting ourselves to this democratic government as one where we are subservient to the court of the ruler or are we siding with the mustadafin, with the oppressed? The democratic South African government has, in too many respects, taken the rhetoric of liberation and placed it in service of a capitalist system that perpetuates the very inequalities it claimed to dismantle.
Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed was read in the very townships that produced the 1976 generation, taught us that education is never neutral. Education either domesticates and pacifies or it liberates. It either teaches the child to accept the world as it is, or it arms them with the consciousness to change it. He called the passive transfer of facts the ‘banking model’ of education, depositing state-approved knowledge into passive recipients to produce compliant workers, not critical citizens.
Bantu Education was abolished. But its logic endures in practice. The democratic government has failed to replace the apartheid education system entirely that was designed to produce cheap labour with one designed to produce free and critical human beings. It has instead administered and directed the slow strangulation of public schooling through austerity, neglect, corruption, and the substitution of adequate funding with hollow commemoration.
The statistics are not merely damning. They are a desecration of the memory of 1976. In a country that ritually celebrates Youth Day every June 16, the material conditions of youth in its schools are the following:
- More than 8 200 schools (one-third of public schools) are overcrowded, the burden falling overwhelmingly on Black and working-class communities.
- Classrooms in township schools run with 60 to 70 pupils per teacher; in the Eastern Cape, classes routinely exceed 80, sometimes surpassing 100.
- South Africa’s national learner-educator ratio is 33:1, against an OECD average of 16:1.
- 74 per cent of South African schools have no library. 83 per cent have no laboratory. Only one in three has a computer centre.
- The Eastern Cape has 846 schools still using pit latrines. The provincial MEC admits it will take more than ten years to fix infrastructure backlogs.
- Four in ten learners who enrol in Grade 1 will not matriculate. Only 59 per cent of learners who began Grade 2 a decade ago completed matric in 2025.
- NSFAS, meant to provide access to higher education for the poor, faces a R14 billion funding shortfall, threatening more than 100 000 eligible students with exclusion in 2026 alone.
- 9.7 million children depend on the National School Nutrition Programme for their only reliable daily meal. A hungry child cannot learn.
- More than 23 000 education posts, nearly five per cent of the public education workforce, were cut in a single financial year.
The 1976 generation did not mobilise, protest and sacrifice so that their grandchildren could inherit classrooms with 100 learners to one teacher and schools without toilets. The neoliberal framework adopted in the post-apartheid period, the GEAR policy, successive austerity budgets, the wholesale deference to market logic over social need, has not created a liberatory education system.
Freire was precise on this point; when the oppressed gain power but retain the oppressor’s model, they become oppressors themselves. The failure to transform the education system is not bureaucratic incompetence alone. It is ideological. An education system that reproduces inequality, that funnels the children of the wealthy into well-resourced private schools while township children crowd 70 to a room without a library, is functioning exactly as the capitalist system intends it to function.
To paraphrase Frantz Fanon, the 1976 generation emerged from obscurity to fulfil their mission. They showed that high school students with critical consciousness, solidarity, and courage can shake the foundations of an oppressive system.
South African Muslims are not bystanders in this struggle for liberatory education. They are historically, theologically, and morally positioned to be among its most committed and principled voices. The Auwal Mosque school established by Muslim slaves in the colonised Cape in 1794 was not a charitable act. It was a defiant declaration to their oppressors that their Islam demands every human being is entitled to an education regardless of whether they were free, enslaved, colonised or dispossessed. That declaration is as urgent in 2026 South Africa as it was in 1794.
The Quranic verse states: ‘And what is [the matter] with you that you fight not in the cause of Allah and for the oppressed among men, women, and children…’ (Sura An-Nisa, 4:75). Islamic obligation towards the poor and the oppressed is not only discharged by the payment of zakah or sadaqah. It is also discharged in the demand that every child, regardless of race, class, or location, receives a quality education, free at the point of access, publicly funded and accountable. Supporting relief and development activities through our Muslim charities is laudable and even praiseworthy, but the mission of the Revolutionary Messenger of the Almighty, Muhammad (SAW), was to challenge and change the very system that creates inequality, hunger and poverty.
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It becomes equally obligatory on all the Muslims of South Africa to broaden their social commitment and responsibility from largely providing food relief to expressing their solidarity and affirming the dignity of the oppressed by playing a more active advocacy role in demanding free, quality public education from early childhood to tertiary education, fully funded by the state and insulated from market logic and private capture.
Muslims, particularly those within the business and financial sector that have political access and possess an in-depth knowledge of the economy, are best placed to demand an end to austerity in education. The R32 billion needed to fix South Africa’s school infrastructure crisis must be treated as a moral obligation, not a budgetary inconvenience.
Muslims involved in the education sector, whether private or public, should be leading and advancing the demand for an Iqra curriculum, which is essentially a curriculum that develops critical consciousness, that names oppression, exposes inequality, and prepares young people to transform their world rather than merely adapt to it.
To paraphrase Frantz Fanon, the 1976 generation emerged from obscurity to fulfil their mission. They showed that high school students with critical consciousness, solidarity, and courage can shake the foundations of an oppressive system.
Cassiem Khan is spokesperson for the Inqilab Collective, a grassroots movement that advocates for social justice, liberation and transformative political engagement.
