The South African Students Congress (SASCO) is a South African student organisation currently led by Bamanye Matiwane as the organization's President. SASCO was founded in September 1991 at

Rhodes University Rhodes University is a public university, public research university located in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, Makhanda (Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is one of four universities in the province. Established in 1904, ...

Grahamstown Makhanda, also known as Grahamstown, is a town of about 140,000 people in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is situated about northeast of Port Elizabeth and southwest of East London, Eastern Cape, East London. Makhanda is the lar ...

Eastern Cape The Eastern Cape is one of the provinces of South Africa. Its capital is Bhisho, but its two largest cities are East London and Gqeberha. The second largest province in the country (at 168,966 km2) after Northern Cape, it was formed in ...

, through the merger of the South African National Student Congress (SANSCO) and the

National Union of South African Students The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was an important force for liberalism and later radicalism in South African student anti-apartheid politics. Its mottos included non-racialism and non-sexism. Early history NUSAS was founde ...

(NUSAS). The predecessor of SANSCO, the Azanian Students Organisation (AZASO) was initially formed in 1979 as a continuation of the

South African Students Organisation The South African Students' Organisation (SASO) was a body of black South African university students who resisted apartheid through non-violent political action. The organisation was formed in 1969 under the leadership of Steve Biko and Barney P ...

(SASO) when the latter was banned by the

Apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

government. SASO, in turn, got started by

Steve Biko Bantu Stephen Biko (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known ...

as a breakaway faction from NUSAS in the 1960s. SASCO is the biggest student movement in Africa . It organizes students in institutions of higher learning striving for the transformation of not just institutions of higher learning but the whole system in order to achieve a non-sexist, non-racial, working class biased and democratic education system.

References

External links

SASCO's official website
{{Authority control Student organisations in South Africa 1991 establishments in South Africa Student organizations established in 1991