Only emancipation of the mind through education will help youths conquer future
Our youth must strive for knowledge, innovation and view themselves as moulders, not prisoners of circumstances
As we approach the end of June, the most important thing is to give young people mental tools to assist them to navigate what appears like an unconquerable future.
The idea is to render young people self-sufficient, not to expect hand-outs.
Our youth must be rescued from the belittling mentality of “service delivery”, the idea that one must wait for things to be delivered to them. Life does not work like that. One must work to get things.
The usual retort is: there are no jobs in South Africa. Where do you expect us to work? That may be valid, but who do you expect to create a job for you, and why?
In Mozambique, no young person grows up with the idea that someone will create a job for them. Politicians there don’t promise jobs, for everyone knows that such a thing will never happen.
Mozambican youth grow up with the consciousness of Steve Biko’s liberating realism: “Black man, you are on your own.”
Driven by such a mentality, each young person in Mozambique asks: “What must I do to survive?” This is why the average Mozambican you meet in South Africa is a car mechanic, a plumber, an electrician or a carpenter. They do things for themselves.
Interestingly, most Mozambican artisans will tell you they did not go to a formal school to learn their trade, they learn from the school of real life. In other words, they hustle.
The first lesson for our youth here in SA is to learn to do things for themselves while remembering Biko’s words: “Black man, you are on your own.”
However, SA is different from Mozambique. Ours is a land of opportunities. Eastern Europeans, Nigerians, Indians, Zimbabweans, Pakistanis or Congolese arrive here very poor, and end up rich. We are the only country in Africa that offers such opportunities.
It is tragic that millions of black South Africans are trapped in poverty, although it is also true there are black South Africans who can say they are “living the dream” – to borrow from Somizi Mhlongo’s showy words.
Poverty is not a choice, but a person can choose to escape it. The surest way out of poverty in SA is through education.
What is more strategic for young black South Africans, however, is not to defeat poverty. It is to conquer the future.
While the struggle against poverty is the most primary, devoting all efforts to it will not lift us far above animality.
We must get to a point where the best inventions in science and technology, or the most compelling model of organising human society, come from black minds.
To get there, young black people must be enabled to see beyond our current institutional and cultural arrangements that sustain the dominance of the idea that only white minds are capable of producing great things.
The starting point towards such a future for black people must be the adoption of a transformational way of understanding our societies.
Transformational not in the banal political sense of envious black parasites who want to suck material benefit from the white establishment, but in the truly revolutionary sense of altering the institutional and cultural arrangements of our existence.
Our young people can do this only if they are intellectually empowered to appreciate their power to transcend their circumstances, and to view themselves as moulders, not prisoners of their social circumstances. This, in a nutshell, is the second lesson.
The third and final lesson is for our youth to know how to immortalise themselves long after their demise.
The people who leave indelible marks on the canvas of human existence are those who produce things that outlast not only the activity of their production, but also more importantly, things whose timeless value applies universally to humankind.
Such things could be soft or hard. The indelibility of Nelson Mandela’s contribution to humanity testifies to the nobility and everlastingness of soft values. The indestructibility of the Egyptian pyramids corroborates the immortality of the joint products of the human mind and hands.
The idea that a young black South African from a poor village cannot register his name in world affairs or cannot be remembered by history, has already been debunked by Mandela. Our young people must simply fly higher.
This, in short, is what we mean by conquering the future. It is the big-mindedness of dreams in a society that cannot see beyond the length of its nose.