Hayibo.com - DA remembers victims of 1976 Cancelled Cliff Richard Concert

DA remembers victims of 1976 Cancelled Cliff Richard Concert

CAPE TOWN. The teenagers of 1976 have asked why the 50-year-olds of 2009 still live in shacks on R250 a month, 15 years after the teenagers of 1930 liberated South Africa. Meanwhile the Democratic Alliance has staged its own memorial for the victims of the 1976 Cancelled Cliff Richard Concert, many of whom lost dozens of Rands of saved pocket money.

On June 16, 1976, thousands of black school children took to the streets of South Africa's townships in protest against being forced to read Afrikaans novels about depressed farmers' wives waiting for the drought to end so that they could get their son to hospital to have a colostomy bag fitted.

Apartheid police, fearing for the livelihoods of mediocre Afrikaans novelists, fought running battles with the pupils, killing many.

Today pupils are called "learners", thanks largely to 15 years of Outcomes Based Education in which the real words for things have been forgotten.

Asked why "learners" were being given yet another day off school, Education Department spokesman Chalky Nyamende said that they were trying to "ease learners into their post-school roles".

"For some reason employers do not respect a South African Matric, even though we print it on top-quality toilet paper and use very nice gold stars to decorate it," explained Nyamende.

"Therefore we feel it is important to give learners a feel for what their 20s will be like: waking up in their mother's house, sitting around all day, and then watching the soaps."

Meanwhile in Cape Town this morning Democratic Alliance officials laid a wreath outside Computicket in remembrance of the victims of 1976's Cancelled Cliff Richard Concert.

DA organizer Penny Bollocks, who was 14 in 1976, says she still sometimes wakes up screaming.

"I still cry when I hear 'Summer Holiday'," said Bollocks, who lost R2.50 of her pocket money when the British rocker cancelled his Bachelor Boy Goes Bantu in the Bundu tour in May of 1976.

Western Cape MEC for Arts and Culture, Pierneef Adonis, said that the trauma of the Cancelled Cliff Richard Concert would never be forgotten, until it was.

Survivor Agnes Maudlin, who also lost R2.50, said that time had healed her wounds, and they she was grateful for what she had.

"Yes, it was a terrible time, what with the concert and the blacks running around like that, but today I look at what I have – a massive house in Constantia, an honest Malawian in the garden, thirteen beautiful pugs – and I realize life always finds a way."