Finding our mission in our time

IF, AS Frantz Fanon said, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it,” the question must necessarily arise as to what our generation’s mission is.

In attempting to answer this and find out how we should go about fulfilling this mission, the youth and all of us are obliged to reflect on yet another observation made by an earlier thinker who said: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under selfselected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

This implies that it would be a mistake to employ a literal, simplistic interpretation to Fanon because whatever the mission of the current generation is, it is also the mission of the past, present and future. And the mission is society’s sustained and honest attempts to create a social reality that is radically different from that of the past – which is also the midwife of the present.

The question of what each generation’s mission is will continuously be posed through history.

A cursory glance at the South African struggle for liberation reveals the correctness of Fanon’s aphorism. The Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 marked the phasing out of mid-18th century generations of African chiefs and members of the middle strata.

The 1940s, which saw the formation of the ANCYL and the infusion of radical politics into the ANC, was yet another generational epoch, as was the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s and the June 16, 1976 uprising.

In the past 20 years, the consensus has been that young people must, consistent with the Reconstruction and Development Programme principles of this country, immerse themselves in youth development initiatives.

The National Youth Commission and now the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) was formed to act as the agent for youth development.

The NYDA requires support from all youth formations in order for it to properly discharge its duties.

At the same time, we need to rekindle the activism of yesteryear around key issues affecting young people and society as a whole. This would include:

Mobilising young people and society for renewed commitment to the culture of learning and teaching inside and out of the classroom

Mobilising people to appreciate that they are the motive force for taking South Africa forward through hard work and not through government doing things for them.

This requires a fundamental mind shift away from the unintended consequences brought about by the uncritical use of the phrase “service delivery”, which has in some (significant) instances come to mean government delivers to an inactive and helpless citizenry

Mobilising people around the constitutional principle of a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, men and women, black and white and without regard to ethnicity

Mobilising people to appreciate the interconnectedness of South Africa and the rest of the continent and the world

Mobilising society around a renewed social morality underpinned by the values of ubuntu and the religious aphorism: “I am my brother’s/sister’s keeper”

Mobilising society around the attainment of economic freedom in our lifetime.

Those like Fanon, or our own Chief Albert Luthuli, Anton Lambede, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Lillian Ngoyi, Robert Sobukwe, Ruth First, Joe Slovo and many others who moved millions, were always prepared to make immense sacrifices. Above all, they subscribed to and exuded a morality that was different from the prevailing social morality.

As Karl Marx wrote in a letter to his father in 1837: “If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

We have to bare the sentiments of these words when we continuously search, as we must, for our mission and how best to go about fulfilling it. Temba Tinta is the deputy executive mayor of Buffalo City Metro and the ANC’s regional treasurer