South African youths should fight the modern-day scourges of crime and corruption just as their counterparts fought apartheid in the Soweto uprising 30 years ago, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.
Even today, the uprising remains one of the defining moments of the anti-apartheid movement and a touchstone for the generation that fought against white minority rule and who would lead South Africa into the democratic era.
Mbeki, marking Friday's anniversary in the black township south of Johannesburg, called on young people to wage their own battle to strengthen multi-party democracy.
"The youth need to confront those who disrespect our freedom by abusing other people, robbing, raping, killing and destroying public and private property," Mbeki told about 40,000 people in a stadium in Soweto.
South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of homicide and rape. Official statistics show there were more than 18,000 homicides in the year to March 2005.
Mbeki said it was crucial for young people to embrace the principles of South Africa's constitution - although he admitted the country also must work harder to solve problems particularly affecting youths, such as unemployment and AIDS.
Earlier, Mbeki laid wreaths at the Hector Pieterson memorial in Soweto and then led about 1,000 people, some singing and shouting anti-apartheid liberation slogans, on a 5 km (3 mile) march through the streets - the exact route taken by thousands of black students on June 16, 1976.
Initially, the 1976 protest was directed at the white government's insistence that students be taught in Afrikaans, spoken by the mostly Dutch-descended ruling Afrikaners and seen then as the language of the oppressor.
Police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing Pieterson and about two dozen others and setting off a wave of national street marches and demonstrations that received world-wide attention and increased black opposition to apartheid.
A photo, showing Pieterson dead in the arms of a strapping young man and Pieterson's sister by his side, went around the world and came to symbolise the brutality of apartheid.
An estimated 500 to 600 young protesters are believed to have been killed by security forces in Soweto alone during the ensuing six to seven months of protests.
The anniversary is marked every year with a national holiday, known as Youth Day.
Earlier this week, former South African President Nelson Mandela said he hoped that young South Africans would remember and honour the sacrifices of the students who had marched and bled in the streets of Soweto in 1976.
The 87-year-old Mandela was a political prisoner when the uprising began.