Bunia, 16 June 2011 – Like in the rest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the children of Ituri district also celebrated the Day of the African Child. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) sponsored the event to enable the children to celebrate their own day.

Ituri is located at the northeastern corner of the DRC, bordering Uganda and South Sudan. In Bunia, the capital of the district, children celebrated the day performing a number of theatrical presentations on themes related to what they consider their rights and duties, and also rendered songs, read poems and danced, mostly focusing on the plight of street children.

The day ended with the visit of a delegation of school children to the town's central prison, where they presented items of basic necessity to detained minors.

The day of the African Child is celebrated on 16 June every year to commemorate the 1976 massacre of hundreds of black school children in the South African township of Soweto, as they protested against the education system under the apartheid regime, which denied them the right to be educated in their language and in English. Instead, they were imposed Afrikaans as the language of instruction, which in their eyes embodied the oppressor.

Amadou Maiga/ MONUSCO