Azania Simthandile Tyhali shared her views about Youth Month, 50 years on since June 16th, 1976. Image: Shelley Christians/UWC

As Youth Month drew to a close, South Africa’s public spaces once again settled into a familiar rhythm of speeches, commemorations, and annual reflections on June 16 that echoed across schools, universities and civic gatherings.

But beneath the ritual of remembrance lay a quieter, more difficult question: what did June 16 mean for young people navigating unemployment, migration, inequality and uncertainty in the present?

It was a question that found particular resonance in the voice of University of the Western Cape (UWC) PhD candidate, Azania Tyhali, not only because of what she studied, but because of the life trajectory that shaped how she read history, education and the present.

Tyhali is a doctoral candidate in migration at the Institute for Social Development (ISD), where her research focuses on how people construct belonging, identity and community across movement, displacement and changing social worlds. Her work sits at the intersection of lived experience and theory grounded in working-class realities, shaped by labour histories, and attentive to how young people navigate uncertain futures.

This combination of personal history, academic inquiry and focus on youth precarity made her a compelling voice in reflecting on June 16 at the end of Youth Month. She did not speak about education, migration or inequality as abstract concepts, but as lived conditions that continue to shape how meaning, opportunity and survival are negotiated.

“We remembered June 16 every year, but we did not always engage with what those young people were really trying to confront, or what it meant for young people today,” she said.

For Tyhali, migration is not only about crossing borders. It is also about the quieter forms of movement that define contemporary life, economic instability, shifting identities and the search for belonging in spaces that do not always offer permanence. In that sense, her research provides a lens for reading June 16 not as a closed historical event, but as part of an ongoing struggle over dignity, access and social belonging.

Born in Sterkspruit, between the Eastern Cape and Lesotho, she grew up in a household shaped by labour consciousness and public service. Her mother worked in the public health sector in the Eastern Cape. She was involved in a worker organisation, exposing her to ideas of solidarity, struggle and collective survival from an early age.

“Care and struggle were not separate in my upbringing. They were part of how people lived and responded to hardship.”

Tyhali believes that as Youth Month drew to a close, June 16 should not have remained confined to ritual. Image: Shelley Christians/UWC

It was from this grounding that one of the central ideas in her doctoral work emerged, which she calls the “neglected politics of care.”

For Tyhali, care is often treated as private, emotional or domestic labour, rather than as a political and economic force that sustains society itself. She believes that this invisibility reflects deeper social choices about what is valued, what is recognised, and whose labour is made visible.

“The neglected politics of care was about recognising that survival itself was organised through care. It was the every day labour of raising children, supporting families, holding communities together, and yet it was treated as if it sat outside of politics,” she said.

“Care was what kept people alive in difficult conditions, but it was rarely named as part of how society functioned.”

This perspective is rooted in lived experience, particularly the women in her community whose labour combines caregiving, emotional resilience and economic survival, often without recognition.

It also reshapes how she interprets June 16.

“The students of 1976 were not only responding to their immediate conditions, but there was also a sense of responsibility for those who would come after them.”

For Tyhali, this connection between care and political struggle is often missing in how June 16 is remembered, where history is preserved, but not always allowed to interrogate the present.

That tension becomes sharper in her ideas about higher education, particularly in a context where universities are increasingly measured by employment outcomes.

She cautions against reducing education to a narrow pathway into the labour market, especially in a country where youth unemployment shapes how young people define their worth.

“Higher education should develop critical thinking, social understanding and the ability to engage with complexity,” she said. “It is not only preparation for work, but preparation for citizenship.”

When education is reduced to employability alone, it risks narrowing both imagination and possibility.

“Survival matters, but it cannot be the only framework through which society understands education or contribution.”
Instead, she sees universities, including UWC, as spaces that should also cultivate empathy, ethical awareness, and social responsibility, all of which connect back to her broader concept of care.

Across her doctoral research at the ISD, migration remains central not only as movement across space, but as a way of understanding how people continuously negotiate identity, place and meaning in uncertain worlds.

These questions, she suggests, are inseparable from the broader meaning of June 16 itself: who education is for, and what kind of society is being shaped for the next generation.

As Youth Month draws to a close, she believes June 16 should not remain confined to ritual.

“If we only observe it as a date, something important is lost. It should continue to ask questions of us,” she concluded.