Black girls start with a clean slate
Two enterprising youngsters are giving teenagers the perfect place in which to meet their challenges
Fi f t e e n - y e a r - o l d A mo n g e Elethu Sinxoto and her 21-year-old cousin Zingisa Socikwa are the brains behind Blackboard, a new online content platform for teens that aims to create a space for the difficult conversations that teenagers are having.
From identity politics to beauty standards, “blessers’’, capitalism and history, the youth are finding creative ways to grapple with social issues.
With a growing social media following and an imminent website launch, Blackboard presents a blank canvas for South Africa’s youth to write themselves into history, yet again. Here the girls talk about their journey so far. superficial, and real issues are rarely spoken about, especially ones that pertain to our blackness. Amonge: Blackboard the name is an analogy of black girls. We are made of a hard substance, but smooth at the same time. We are black yet have spent our entire lives being written on by white chalk.
It is now time to write our own stories, stories that resonate with us, in order to influence the mindsets of the next young black girls coming up.
We are unapologetically black and we have realised that we cannot just change our mindsets alone; we also need to engage with black boys because we do realise that other people can connect with what we are trying to do and they can also call themselves Blackboards. It’s a space for us black girls to reclaim our identity, a safe environment for us to voice our frustrations and triumphs and rewrite his-story, her-story, our-story. Zingisa: Together we can, but alone no one can. Amonge: My friends have been very supportive in terms of helping to build content.
My parents have also been extremely supportive, helping us with contacts and generally guiding us in the right direction when they see us heading on the wrong path. They keep reminding us to stay true to why we started this and to remain genuine. Most importantly to put aside self gain and focus on a collective goal. Zingisa: My family has been very supportive. They keep encouraging us to pursue our passions. The friends I keep around me are already in the same headspace as me, so they are very like-minded and helpful. Amonge: The more time I commit to research and read more, the more I discover there’s a lot to be done, which is sometimes overwhelming. The other challenge for me personally would be balancing it all. I am working on school and Blackboard, and at the same time still just want to be a teenager. Zingisa: The most challenging thing is being too passionate and creative to the extent that other people don’t see your vision or understand where you are coming from and what you want to achieve or just understanding the bigger picture behind an idea you have. That for me, most of the time, leaves me so frustrated and angry that other people aren’t as open, that they don’t want to challenge the norm. It makes me feel crazy. Amonge: Recently I have been engaging in some conversations regarding capitalism and how the world system works. I cannot claim to completely understand the kinds of things that are happening but I know enough for me to recognise that there is a major problem with the way in which society as a whole has become so blinded to the fact that we as Africans are still literally being completely tricked out of our assets. Zingisa: [Because of] the lack of willingness, we have to take a stand and change things as the youth.
Another major thing is the decline of basic morals — from the way we carry ourselves and seeing how normal it is to walk around half-naked these days, all the way to this craze of “blessers”. It’s disturbing and scary to think of the degeneration that has happened from my generation to Amonge’s in such a short period of time. The more we keep quiet the worse it gets. ness people have to help and mentor us where they can. Amonge: To me, Youth Day stands as a symbol of just how powerful we really are. Youth Day represents the capacity in which we can institute change within our communities. Zingisa: Youth Day means a time to reflect on what was done and what we should be doing and what we can be doing in order for change to take place for me personally. Zingisa: We want to have career days, to create opportunities to expose young girls to careers they are not exposed to.
We want to host motivational talks by people of substance with young girls of colour. We want to host events that bring like-minded people together. We also want to have a print magazine for girls of colour to have a reference for their looks, their experiences and the things that interest them. We want to have a buddy system where we connect high school girls with women in varsity so they get first-hand information about life outside school instead of getting their info from social media. There’s so much we want to do.