Youth Day, Juneteenth and who decides what a country remembers about its painful past?

Youth Day and Juneteenth are about painful history, but the bigger fight is over who controls memory, repair and the future.

South Africa marks Youth Day every year on 16 June, remembering the students who rose against apartheid education in 1976. Three days later, the United States (US) observes Juneteenth, commemorating the belated emancipation of enslaved people in Texas in 1865.

Both commemorations are about painful history. But the real story isn’t only what countries remember: it’s what governments do with those memories when they become politically inconvenient.

Professor Siona O’Connell from the University of Pretoria puts it plainly. “Memory is never just about the past: it is about legitimacy, land, and power in the present,” she tells /explain/. “To control what happened is to control who has a claim on redress, belonging, and the future.”

SA remembers loudly. But does it repair enough?

On paper, public memory honours young people who weren’t passive victims of apartheid, but political actors who helped to change the country.

But 50 years after the Soweto Uprising, the question remains: Does South Africa remember young people only when they are safely in the past?

A government can lay wreaths for the youth of 1976 while failing the youth of 2026, who are still living through unemployment, poverty, and inequality. Statistics South Africa’s 2026 first-quarter labour data shows the official unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 34 was 45.8%. For those aged 15 to 24, it was 60.9%.

“The commemorative gestures exist: Juneteenth, Youth Day,” O’Connell says. “Structural redress is a harder conversation both societies keep deferring,” she says.

O’Connell says whitewashing history is not only about lying outright. It’s also about selective forgetting.

“Whitewashing does not just distort the past, it forecloses futures,” she says. “Sanitising history denies younger generations the tools to understand the world they have inherited and reproduces the conditions that made the original harm possible.”

She points to the Wynberg 7, high-school activists imprisoned for anti-apartheid activism in the late 1980s, as a cautionary example.

“The Wynberg 7 are a case in point: high schoolers imprisoned for public violence in the late 1980s, who made enormous contributions and sacrifices to the anti-apartheid struggle,” she says. “They were subsequently forgotten by the very society they helped to transform. That forgetting is not incidental: it is what whitewashing looks like in practice.”

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is a useful example of memory without enough repair. The TRC helped to uncover apartheid-era human rights violations and created a public record of suffering and responsibility.

But many of its broader recommendations, including reparations, were never fully implemented. Human Rights Watch has noted that the failure to follow through on TRC recommendations left major questions of justice and accountability unresolved.

Juneteenth marks 19 June 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, and announced freedom for enslaved African Americans there, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, making 19 June a federal holiday.

In March 2025, US President Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. It said federal museums, parks, and historical sites should become “solemn and uplifting” public monuments, and targeted displays the administration said “inappropriately disparage” Americans.

As of 17 June 2026, the US National Park Service had removed at least 51 exhibits from 37 sites, according to a court-ordered inventory. One removed exhibit from Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park described George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people. A federal judge ordered the exhibits restored by 3 July 2026.

O’Connell says the similarity between the US’s history of slavery and South Africa’s apartheid history is not only in the oppression itself. It is also in the failure to fully reckon with their ongoing legacy.

“Both systems were built on the legal, economic, and physical subjugation of black people, leaving afterlives that continue to shape inequality, land ownership, and daily life,” she says. “What strikes me most is not the similarity of the systems: it is the similarity of the failure to reckon with them.”

O’Connell says what is often called “forgetting” is really a choice about whose discomfort gets protected.

“Selective amnesia does not produce unity: it produces a surface calm that benefits people who were never harmed,” she says. “Real unity requires acknowledgement, not erasure. The question is: Unity for whom, and at what cost?”

Remembering painful history can feel divisive because it forces a country to ask who benefited, who suffered, and what remains unequal. But forgetting doesn’t create unity: it creates silence. And silence usually protects the people comfortable with the status quo.

Spain is a useful warning. After dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, Spain’s transition to democracy was shaped by what became known as the “pacto del olvido”, or pact of forgetting. The idea was to avoid reopening the wounds of civil war and dictatorship. Decades later, Spain is still fighting over mass graves, monuments, Francoist nostalgia, and how the dictatorship should be taught to younger generations.

O’Connell warns that when young people lose their connection to historical events, this doesn’t mean they’re neutral.

“They are left with a gap filled by nostalgia, nationalism, or myth,” she says. “Disconnection does not produce neutrality: it produces vulnerability to whoever tells the loudest story.”

Democracy needs discomfort. It needs citizens who know what happened before they were born, who can recognise old injustices in a new language, and who can question leaders when they try to make the past more convenient.

Remembering painful history does not trap countries in the past. When done honestly, it helps them stop lying about the present.

Forgetting, on the other hand, may feel calm. It may even feel patriotic. But it leaves societies vulnerable to myth, nostalgia, and political manipulation.

The question is whether countries are brave enough to remember honestly – and then repair what memory reveals.