South Africa's doomed youth

The tendency to project the racist, sexist, violent-peddling hate-talk of Julius Malema as just a normal expression of the fervour, overzealousness and recklessness of youth, is a deliberate attempt to take focus away from sober, critical, vigilant, intellectual, innovative and creative voices and faces among the youth. Unfortunately the glorification of thoughtless action, the ‘dismissal’ of theory and the marginalisation of analytical minds have had dire and ghastly consequences for South Africa. The problems that the country has – with regard to the violent nature of crime, apathetically low levels of respect of life, lack of appreciation of the self and indifference to parental guidance – could be traced to the era in our history when we lionised youths, who acted without first getting theoretical clarity of the situation facing them and weighing critically the strategic and tactical choices available to them.

Even at that time, there were voices among youths that appealed for action rooted in the clarity of vision regarding the future. But the media and academia chose to give prominence to youth outfits which availed them the opportunity to cover dramatic incidents of empty classrooms, principals running for their lives, children making their mothers and fathers drink Jik and eat Sunlight soap, youngsters administering justice with petrol-fire and kerosene. To the media and academia the clamour of ‘liberation first, education after’ was catchier than the erudite call of ‘educate to liberate’. Indefinite school boycotts made more spectacle sense than cautious, restrained calculation of how much damage a boycott inflicted on the system and how much loss it incurred on the students.

Now that the problems, accrued from the culture of more toi-toi and less think-think, continue to bedevil our school system, none of the adults are willing to own the role they played in taking the struggle from the streets into the classrooms, as opposed to the black consciousness-inspired youths of 1976, who took the struggle out of the classrooms into the streets, and towards the system. Today, we can only give prominence to Malema and ilk and marginalise young people with critical, creative, innovative minds at our own peril. Once the culture of violence, disrespect for life, intolerance for dissent, disdain of theory and analysis and dismissal of thinking and reflection has set in, it will take centuries to do away with. It is, therefore, regretful to notice the governing party and sections of academia and the media tacitly promoting the Malemarisation of youth politics and public discourse in general.

In the mid-eighties, when youths were at the centre of rebelling against the regime and regiments of apartheid-capitalism, there were tragically also excesses and extremes in the manner in which young people – at the behest of the adults and with the involvement of many of their elders in political parties - went about the project of rendering South Africa ungovernable and apartheid-capitalism untenable. There were ghastly instances of blood-thirsty necklacing, witch-hunting of sell-outs and indiscriminate killing of people with dissenting political opinions.

In that ghostly climate of intolerance of dissent, there was an official vilification of theory and analysis in some quarters, glorifying action and deifying recklessness as being gallant. People and organisations who engaged in critical and thoughtful thinking on strategy and tactics, were cautious with regard to the tactics of academic and consumer boycotts and strike-action. They spoke against the ‘necklace’ and were branded as agents of the system. This led to bloody scenes of internecine violence between 1983 and 1999. The apartheid regime also took advantage of this and fermented more violence through police brutality, vigilante groups and the so-called third force in the 1990s, as well as various sly ways of setting anti-apartheid groups against each other. The gangsters were also infiltrated and used by the agents of the system to escalate violence and proliferate lethal drugs such as mandrax, cocaine and heroine in the townships.

The situation worsened in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. We saw scenes of youths operating in street committees, defence units and the so-called people’s courts, mediating with the whip and ‘necklace’ in domestic and neighbourhood conflicts. The street committee members would go on house-to-house raids, forcefully taking young people, including young girls to go on street-patrols. There were then many reports of sexual abuse and rape, of young girls being taken to certain hide-outs and camps and being raped. As a result of fear of the comrades and cynicism towards the apartheid police these cases were never reported. There was no chance of these instances being dealt with by the people’s courts because members were themselves culprits in some instances. Some neighbours, including business people started abusing the street committees and defence units to settle old scores and pursue personal agendas. This was aided by the corruptible nature of members of these outfits who often took bribery and ended up as being sort of hired assassins or hired lynch mobs, in some instances.

The rot had set it. Suddenly lawlessness and disorder became the norm in schools. The culture of teaching and learning declined. The schools became the dens of drugs and alcohol and sex. Gang-rape spilled from the schools into the streets and fire-arms became toys. The gangsters became the coolest cats and heroes of the townships. Car-hijackings, house-breaking and heists became sport for young people growing up in South Africa. People started talking of the degeneration of morals amongst the youth. The media and academia coined the term ‘lost generation’ to refer to the youth of this generation. None of the old people who celebrated the recklessness of the young lion are now owning up to the role they played in elevating thoughtless, reckless, theory-less action, which has led to a culture of disrespect for reasoning; has fostered the culture of acting without thinking; and has spawned the comrade-tsotsis, the jackrallers, the trigger-happy, gun-totting gangsters and the adventurously kleptomaniac men and women who govern our lives today.

Generalising about the youths and collectively referring to them as ‘the lost generation’, became a convenient way of running from the fact that the system, our political parties, civil society organisations, the media and academia have all failed the youth. A proper term would be ‘the generation in search of role models’. A generation that has seen struggle, firebrand becoming business brand, guerrillas becoming corporate gorillas, comrades becoming tenderpreneurs, respected leaders becoming culprits and suspects in corruption scandals. Children have seen fathers raping babies and their mothers being clobbered to death by their own fathers. Young people have seen and heard of priests from all religions being involved in rapes, child-molestation, pyramid scandals and various corrupt dealings.

Many of the corrupt government officials, captains of crime syndicates, drug-lords and mafia-bosses of today, are the very same comrades of the street committees, defence units, people’s courts, and guerrilla armies of yesterday. The long and short of it is that glorifying mediocrity, recklessness, violence and idiocy today is investing in the doom and damnation of the future. In marginalising the many imaginative, creative, innovative and critical, intelligent minds and voices in South Africa or Azania at the expense of giving too much platform to the theatrical, comical and farcical, Malema’s is a serious act of injustice against the youth and posterity.

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* Mphutlane wa Bofelo is a South African cultural worker and social critic.
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