EXTRACT
IN FEBRUARY 1991, an article in Time magazine carried an interview with a youth activist going by the pseudonym “Che Guevara”. In the mid-1980s, he walked out of school as part of a boycott and never returned. At age 22, he claimed to be a “hardened veteran” of the struggle against apartheid.
He had killed “enemies of the people” and was prepared to kill again. When leaders of the liberation movement sought to make the townships “ungovernable”, Che became one of the enforcers.
“If I caught a family paying rent to municipal authorities in defiance of the rent boycott, I would serve them with an eviction notice. If they refused to go,” he told journalists, “we’d speak to them in the language of the Struggle. We’d kill them and burn their house down.”
As the Struggle gave way to the new political era, this generation of youth, trained in guns and the politics of resistance, had high hopes that democracy would open the doors of learning and unlock opportunities previously denied to them.
But if the ANC brazened through the absurdities of the early 1990s, it now had its hands full with another, more immediate problem. Among young township militants and Umkhonto we Sizwe combatants, galvanised by the call to make South Africa ungovernable, which characterised the post-1983 era and popularised the use of violence against one’s political opponents, there was now talk of betrayal.
By the time the ANC took the reins from the National Party government in 1994, thousands of men and women had returned home after fleeing into exile.
Millions more township militants who once spent their days marching in ANC camps were now in limbo; they were impatient and idle. In black townships, municipal infrastructure and schools lay in ruins, with devastating consequences for the quality of black school-leavers.
By 1994, school spirit was the only thing intact at Morris Isaacson High School, a cradle of the Struggle.
“The dusty cluster of brick barracks,” observed one journalist, “where black students led the 1976 Soweto uprising, had few books or chalkboards. Vandals had broken most of the windows, ripped out the light fixtures and punched gaping holes in the walls and ceilings.”
Unable to continue their education, countless students like Che gave up on education.
Those activists and township