SA’s watershed moment in politics, life

Youth Month is once again calling on South Africans to pay homage to the courageous and unambiguous spirit of 1976. The year 2026 marks 50 years since devoted young people protested, among others, the exclusive use of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in education.

The gravity of the situation was evident in the violence meted out in the streets of Soweto, Johannesburg – a sacrifice echoed by the blood spilt and the lives lost. Fifty years later, how does one commemorate such a day? Education is always the best place to start. In this particular instance: higher education.

Emeritus Professor Alan Cliff, from the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED), has a career spanning decades on literacy testing for higher education readiness. “16 June 1976 was a watershed moment in South African politics and life. I was a first-year student at Rhodes University, and we were crowded around the radio listening to news releases from the protests in Soweto. Television had only just launched in this country and coverage was minimal and highly selective,” he said.

“We had to imagine/create from audio coverage what is now taken as routine in video reporting. I remember a huge range of emotions and opinions among my fellow students at the time – from left and right of the political spectrum. But I also remember thinking that this was a moment of critique: finally, issues of white hegemony and the right to learn in Mother Tongue and the language of learning and teaching had been the fulcrum around which protests had erupted. School children had taken up the cause – and the iconic, deeply human image of Hector Pieterson being carried from the protests remains imprinted forever.” 

“I am working on using social and critical realist lenses to assess the impact of the work through its history.” 

Emeritus Professor Cliff added: “We have to challenge ourselves to be honest about how relatively unchanged higher education has remained. Global North knowledge systems remain hegemonic and valorised. We have to think about which students and staff are able to see themselves represented in higher education? What systems signals does the sector emit that make it easier or tougher for students to participate/feel represented – this was at least part of the reason for the more recent student protests represented by #RhodesMustFall, for example.”

Institutions, he added, must be vigilant and appreciate the need to think in new ways about who is taught; how they are taught; and what it means for students and the institutions to be ‘literate’.

Reflective mode 

As someone who is interested in challenges of access, redress, and success in higher education, Cliff said: “The most satisfying part of our journey has been seeing the extent to which higher education access for all students to all institutions has indeed widened. The work on literacies assessment has been deeply satisfying especially in terms of its relationship to academic development and programme provision.

“It has also been meaningful to work on troubling the notion that literacies development is only about the identification of student support needs, to a much more holistic understanding of literacies work being about curriculum, teaching and learning, and assessment and the responsiveness of higher education institutions to changing student cohorts,” he said.

“We need to think about what it takes for a student to be higher education ‘ready’ and what it takes for higher education to be ‘ready’ to teach that student.”  

“As emeritus, I am in a reflective mode these days: looking back on 30 years of conceptualising notions of literacies and on the work of developing assessments of these. I am working on using social and critical realist lenses to assess the impact of the work through its history; its purposes; how and why it has been perceived and received in particular ways as a function of educational histories and decades (at least) of segregation, inequality and how these legacies remain powerfully difficult to redress.”

It is possible to think of literacies as extending beyond language, reading and writing.

“How we think about learning potential and ability to be successful has to take account of educational background, educational inequality, how students can learn to be literate in the broadest (socially situated) sense; how higher education itself needs to re-think and critique its own view of literacy and its responsiveness to student diversity and knowledge forms. We need to think about what it takes for a student to be higher education ‘ready’ and what it takes for higher education to be ‘ready’ to teach that student,” Cliff concluded.