Remembering the Trojan Horse Massacre, 40 years later

Wednesday marks 40 years since the tragic Trojan Horse Massacre.

On that day in 1985, groups of young people gathered on Thornton Road in Athlone, Cape Town, to stage an anti-government protest.

The protest was violently disrupted when a group of police officers, who were hiding behind crates on the back of a truck, jumped out and opened fire on the assembled crowd. The officers waited until the truck reached the middle of the road before they commenced firing.

University of the Western Cape (UWC) Research Professor Premesh Lalu explains that students were enraged by an education system they felt kept them trapped within the system of apartheid.

"The first thing is that this movement of students in 1985, and I've insisted that we call it a movement of students rather than a school's boycott, which I think is a misnaming of what was unfolding, was an argument and a fight against gutter education," Lalu states.

Lalu added that the protests were not just focused on education alone.

"And in that moment in '85, young people understood that they were being dragooned into the factories of this country without any possibility of a life of education, a life of thought, a life of culture. And so young people in that period were largely forced into a predicament of an impasse."