New insiders, old outsiders
In the first of a five-part edited extract from a book by Malcolm Ray on the history of the present education crisis, the author traces the early years of democracy, when the lost generation entered the stage
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. Aged 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 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 MK combatants, galvanised by the call to “make South Africa ungovernable” which characterised the post-1983 era and legitimated 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, there were thousands of men and women who returned home after fleeing into exile during the 1970s and eighties.
Millions more township militants who once spent their days marching in ANC camps were now in limbo; they were impatient and idle. In 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, a cradle of South Africa’s long freedom 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 an education altogether.
Those activists and township youths who miraculously survived Bantu education were met at best by an indifferent job market, or at worst (this constituted a significant proportion) by a hostile one which sought to keep them in their place. They were seen as a long-term risk for the country’s economy, which was trying to reduce an accumulated debt and grow its tax base as it funded increased social spending.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu factored a paradigm shift in his portrayal of the young lions when he delivered a Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture. “When you told even young people that they might be teargassed and even killed, there was a spirit almost of bravado as they said, ‘So what? Don’t care what happens to me as long as it advances our cause.’ They spoke of their blood watering the tree of our freedom.”
Whether in response to grief and anger at what they saw as a betrayal or the failure to grasp the political position of the ANC, old ties of political connections and comradeship were snapping.
At the Second Joint Enrichment Project Conference on the Youth held in Broederstroom near Pretoria in June 1991, Mamphele Ramphele warned with prophetic foresight that “the youth could develop into a force which, because of its anarchic, sporadic, and unorganised ways would sabotage the process of building a new society”.
On the day the apartheid regime fell to the ANC in 1994, a quotation describing the apartheid generation of blacks began doing the pro-forma rounds in newsrooms: “The lost generation”. The words were Gertrude Stein’s depiction of the shattered young men returning home from World War I.
With the old apartheid dominion on its knees and the ANC hardly in control of the country’s economic destiny, the lost generation would inhabit the space in between – known as “the transition” – to brandish their own drama in an opaque world somewhere between illusion and reality, between conspiracy and a newly emerging moneyed class. Again, reality passed them by.
The first few years of the government of national unity produced a new vision of social transformation. But the ANC and NP had negotiated a truce that prevented a strategic plan from ever being written by the ANC.
By 1995, it became clear the ANC was going to fill in the blanks left empty by the lost generation who had imagined that freedom and democracy would arrive readymade through the barrel of a gun.
The new plans included technical goals and timetables, a new constitution, the creation of new government structures, economic reform, and educational reform: in short, a legal overhaul of apartheid, culminating in a gradual transition in which the old elite would keep their wealth.
With such an ambitious undertaking, the ANC faced, and in some ways didn’t face, a paradox that was unavoidable. The ruling party was trying to rebuild South Africa in a way that allowed blacks, for the first time in their history, to take control of their destiny. As yet the complexities of governing lacked any ideological purchase beyond a small number of black youths. What recent tradition of engagement with the new order there was among the lost generation belonged mainly to militants more familiar with a gun than the art of diplomacy.
Those youths were aged 16 to 30. A case study during the mid-1990s, based on a sample of 2 200 youths nationwide, found that a staggering 3 million of the country’s 11.5 million youths between the ages of 16 and 30 were jobless. Of these, 2.9 million were “marginalised” or “lost” – completely outside the social safety net. Forty-three percent (4.7 million) were “at risk”, showing signs of alienation and in urgent need of help.
Some joined criminal networks. Still others carried about them a palpable air of frustrated ambition. They yearned to make it to some new land. They longed for opportunities for material advancement, consumer goods and luxuries which the apartheid system refused to give them and the new order could not.
Yet the ideas of the architects of educational reforms produced consequences as tangible as state violence, home-made bombs and gutted buildings. Those consequences must be understood above all in the attempts by the democratic government 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 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 toward reform proved to be a bold gambit. The experiment worked – and years later went farther than its planners had expected.
It unleashed enormous, unexpected forces of change. While the black elite and ANC had regarded each other with 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.
When the doors swung open to new opportunities, a handful of aspirant blacks rushed through with gritty fortitude. 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 turbulent, the scale of which would surpass all expectations. But it must have seemed that way to a handful of men with rare insight into the internal machinations of the ruling party at the moment the grand fiction of the rainbow nation was dissolving into a climate of suspicion and fear that would mark the tipping point and heave the country towards a revival of conflict and revolt. If the 1990s had produced a black elite, it produced another sea besides.
For every black beneficiary, there were millions of black youths who were left out. 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.