New insiders, old outsiders

In the first of a five-part edited extract from his forthcoming book on the history of the education crisis, Malcolm Ray looks at the early years of democracy, when ‘The Lost Generation’ entered the stage

ment to influence the minds of the black youth.

Fortunately for the ANC, the same developments that had made the battle for hearts and minds during the Cold War – anti-capitalist revolt – had also produced moderate black leaders.

In the drive to shape a new middle class, liberated somehow from the radical ideologies and functional to the needs of business, the government sanctioned a moderate experiment in capitalism.

What started out as the first, faltering steps towards reform proved to be a bold gambit. The experiment worked – and went further than its planners had expected. It unleashed enormous forces of change.

While the black elite and ANC had regarded each other with an equal measure of suspicion, in the post-1994 period this tradition merged with the exigencies of the government and business to produce a new paradigm.

In this era, the ANC enlisted a black elite, and the government anointed them as its experimental capitalist sons. And so, when the doors swung open to new opportunities, a handful of aspirant black people rushed through.

They were the poster boys for the disaffected black youth. In the spring of 1991, when men like Cyril Ramaphosa, Marcel Golding and Patrice Motsepe were ascending the national stage, a 10-year-old future ANC Youth League leader named Julius Malema was learning multiplication tables in school.

In the four-year interregnum, South Africa had become a turbulent place, the scale of which would yet surpass all expectations. For if the 1990s had produced a black elite, it also produced another sea besides.

For every black beneficiary, there were millions of black youths who were left out. For one thing, there remained in South Africa an undercurrent of deep mistrust; feelings that grew as the poor came to blame the democratic government for the country’s lost generation.

For those left out, it was a generation of lost opportunities. They were young and their dreams even younger. To the lost generation, democracy was no more real than the promise of a better life.

Malcolm Ray’s book Free Fall: South African Universities in a Race against Time, will be released in November.