30 June 2026 is on everyone’s mind, rightfully so, as it presents a moment when our country could disintegrate or move towards renewal. Here at SERI, we will be shedding our identity as a 15-year-old organisation. Last year, we intended to celebrate that milestone, but our work and its impact on us individually made this impossible. So I insisted that SERI will have a Sweet Sixteen Celebration, breaking away from our own culture of celebrating each half-decade.
It also felt right to acknowledge the work done by SERI in the last 16 years while we honour the youth of 1976 and recognise the powerful legacy of that youth uprising on its 50th anniversary. I had to work hard to convince the team that there is a point to this. I had to convince them that at times, we need people to break the fallow ground and make new paths for others.In 2012, young men in Marikana started discussing their unhappiness with their wages at Lonmin and the undeniable history that their employment in the mines would ensure that their children would be the next generation of exploited labourers. These discussions happened before and after soccer matches, but later developed two things that the Marikana strike is remembered for: a move away from percentage-driven increases in wages and the separation of workers into unions.
The youth of 2012 demanded a wage of R12 500 per month and insisted that new representatives standing for all the workers approach management initially to negotiate the wages of the rock drill operators. The Marikana strike would later earn recognition as South Africa’s first post-apartheid massacre and the most deadly single incident of police killing.
Many do not know that Marikana’s most important legacy is opening the way for even the least paid employee now on the books of Sibanye Stillwater in 2026, taking home more than R12 500 per month. In fact, this has been the state of play for the last few years. In 2022, we asked Sibanye to provide the income that one of the deceased miners would have earned in 2022 had the police not killed him. They recorded the basic salary that he would have earned on his re-employment in July 2014 as R10 296 and informed us that he would be earning R17 596, both significantly more than the RDO basic wages of R6 704 in 2012. We continue to represent the families of those killed and are fighting to ensure that the family of that mineworker is compensated for the financial support that he would have sent to them if his life had not been stolen on 16 August 2012.
A few years after the Marikana Massacre, Mark Heywood wrote to us and other organisations working in the public interest legal services sector asking us to ensure that students have legal representation in the civil and criminal disputes that would come up in the midst of the mobilisation around #FeesMustFall movement, #OutsourcingMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, RUReference list and the different struggles that students were waging to bring to life the hopes held by their parents at the dawn of democracy. We would agree to provide legal representation to students and coordinate legal representation for the release of students in different parts of the country, especially those outside Johannesburg and Cape Town. We ensured legal representation for disciplinary proceedings at Universities, represented students to oppose interdicts and brought other legal proceedings as needed. All of this time, we kept to our lane as lawyers, attempting always to take our lead from those on the frontline. I personally spent a weekend going in and out of the Sunnyside Police Station after police arrested six students and an informal trader following the students’ march to the Union Buildings on 23 October 2015. We had made up our mind to limit, as far as possible, the time that students spent in holding cells in police stations.
I remember that I met Yolanda Dyantyi, who was already a SERI client, for the first time in Makanda after flying to Gqeberha and walking on the campus that the students then called UCKAR (University Currently Known As Rhodes). My only purpose was to accompany her to her meeting at the police station for a criminal investigation related to the RUReference List protests. SERI’s funding then could enable us to ensure that a 19-year-old would not see the inside of a police cell. We did not yet know it, but we would lose one of our long-term funders after our work with the 2015-2016 youth. SERI acted for Yolanda for another 6 years, with the Supreme Court of Appeal reviewing and setting aside her conviction in an internal disciplinary hearing and undoing her lifetime ban from UCKAR. The story of our work with the youth from 2015 to 2021 is longer than that; it includes us publishing a legal and practical guide on Student Protest and documenting the injuries of studentsat the Wits campus between September and November 2016; “ A Double Harm: Police misuse of force and barriers to necessary Health Care Services.
Justifiably, we are all moved by the costs of the student uprising between 2015 and 2021. We mourn the disruption to lives and the loss of life. Many of us are still waiting for the City of Johannesburg to rename De Beer Street to Mthokozi Ntumba Street after the police killed him as he left a doctor’s rooms during another student protest.
The losses are not the full story of the struggle waged by the youth from 2015 to 2021. Whenever I get the opportunity to speak about the parts of our country that work, I point out the comprehensive support that our public purse gives to financially needy students in higher education. That support is one of the key victories of the youth of 2015 - 2021 alongside the insourcing of catering, security and cleaning staff at campuses and, of course, the shift in public discourse on decolonisation and gender-based violence and femicide.
On 20 August 2022, I was invited by Africa is a Country as a panel member in an event that commemorated 10 years since the Marikana Massacre. I arrived in high spirits intending to celebrate what I saw as 10 years of youth uprising from Marikana to Equal Education to #FeesMustFall and the many moments when our youth led the demand for a better South Africa. My friend, Naadira, sought me out before the start of the event and said: “ Nomzamo, they told me not to tell you this, but early this morning, Lindokuhle Mnguni was assassinated at Ekhenana”. Those words broke me. Mnguni was the fourth young leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo to be killed in that year. Despite SERI representing the Ekhenana community since 2020 against over 30 unlawful evictions by the Ethekwini Anti-Land Invasion Unit, I had only met Mnguni earlier that year. Whether talking or silent, he communicated a deep love for black people. I don’t even know if I articulated it that day, but I thought that greed had stolen so much from us, could it not let us keep Mnguni? He was one of those people whose most precious value was in the humanisation of the other. He fought valiantly for his family, for the residents of Ekhenana, for the members of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Even on death, his last brave act was to bring us together to a piece of land in rural KZN which had been allocated to his family, but no home had been built there while he was alive. Abahlali would later keep a promise to build a house with brick and mortar on that land to confirm what we still say even today:
We affirm our collective humanity, and our actions come from a deep love for all our people in South Africa, the continent, and the diaspora. Our actions attempt in the smallest ways to whisper to every child and person of African descent, “You do not need permission to exist, the world is your home. You deserve food in your stomach, a roof over your head, education for your children and quality healthcare. We say that to you because we demand it for ourselves. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.”
Ahead of 30 June, we are issuing an invitation for us to memorialise the 50 years of youth uprising in this country. We are starting with a photo archive of youth in action and are calling people to tag themselves on those pictures and also share photo credits. If you want us to add a specific picture, please email
>> Access the open letter here.