Why+SA+needs+to+rekindle+1976,+Jonny+Steinberg,+B+Day



=Why SA needs to rekindle sacred flame of June 1976=


 * Jonny Steinberg, Business Day, 11 December 2007**

IT HAS become an enduring feature of our South African identity that we ask ourselves over and over why we are such a violent people. There isn’t a simple answer. But one arena we would do well to examine closely is that in which boys become men. For it is males occupying the interregnum between childhood and adulthood who commit most of our violence. In the 1960s, the anthropologists Philip and Iona Mayer wrote several excited and admiring tracts on the socialisation of youths among the amaqaba in the rural Eastern Cape. What astonished the Mayers was that youth socialisation took place with almost no adult supervision. Older children inducted younger ones into work, play, fighting, and sexual conduct. And yet, despite the absence of an adult censor, the youth associations of the amaqaba were remarkably conservative.

“The values they preach and largely practise,” the Mayers marvelled, “are basically the same as their parents’ values; they include respect for seniority, preference for ‘law’ over brute force, and avoidance of pregnancy before marriage.”

The Mayers wrote these words in the thick of the ’60s, a time of unprecedented generational conflict in the west. So it is no surprise that they were gobsmacked by what they saw in Eastern Cape. But the explanation they offered in the end was disarmingly simple. To become a man among the amaqaba was to become a landholder and a husband, and the only way to acquire land was to inherit it from one’s father. One played by one’s father’s rules in order to inherit his life. A boy who strayed might never reach the adulthood to which he aspired.

When I think about it, my own youth was not so different from that of the Xhosa boys of whom the Mayers wrote. I too felt the enormous weight of old and venerable adult institutions pressing down upon me. Unless I got into university, studied hard and got good grades, unless I learned the knowledge, the crafts and the webs of protocol the adult world imparted to me, I was stuffed. I would greet adulthood ruined, a failure.

Both the Mayers’ Xhosa youth and I were sucked into an adulthood that prefigured us. The discipline adult institutions exerted over us was so powerful that we internalised it. Neither of us needed actual adults hovering over us.

Compare us, then, with a black boy who came of age in a Johannesburg township any time between 1930 and 1970.

Very few of them finished school: on average, about a quarter. Most battled to find a place in white SA’s job markets until they were in their mid-20s. Indeed, throughout the ’60s, more than 50% of black Johannesburg males aged between 14 and 20 neither went to school nor worked. There was thus a long, awful period during which they were no longer boys and not yet men.

And what of the manhood that eventually awaited them? Their parents were no longer proud landholders, but unskilled urban workers. They were poorly educated, and, for the most part, politically docile. Township boys did not by any stretch of the imagination aspire to inherit the lives of their parents. And so the weight of the adult institutions that pulled me and the Mayers’ Xhosa youth into adulthood simply did not exist for three generations of township youth.

What came to life in this yawning gap was pervasive gangsterism. The Hazels, the Msomis, the Americans; these remain household names to this day. They mugged tired workers on their way home, robbed the occupants of train carriages at gunpoint, held up township delivery vans in broad daylight. They also detested the small elite of township youths who were getting educated; it was not uncommon in late ’ 60s and early ’70s Soweto for high schools to form self-defence structures to ward off gangsters.

Black urban SA was saved from its youth crisis by the 1976 uprisings. Soweto’s elite of high-school students gathered up their disenchantment with their parents’ poor education and unskilled work, and hurled their anger where it belonged: at the apartheid state. The movement they formed garnered such moral authority that they took the greater body of township youth with them.

In the ensuing 14 years, gangsterism retreated. The great gangs of the 1960s and early ’70s died. Antiapartheid struggle was where it was happening. A generation of youth who would have joined gangs found themselves on the fringes of the uprisings, their hunger for turf to defend and an enemy to fight sated by the war against the regime.

In the early 1990s, with white rule finally defeated, SA’s great youth crisis returned to the world like the awakening of Rip van Winkle. It had not gone away; it had merely been sleeping. Only now, it was far more acute. If the youths of 1960s despised their parents for being in lowly, unskilled work, today’s youth are far more likely to have parents who are not employed at all.

If the youths of the ’60s could mug commuters and hold up delivery vans, today’s youth can predate upon an entire suburban middle class, and can access a continent-wide black market for cars and parts, guns and ammunition, electronics and drugs.

What in the ’60s and early ’70s had been a delinquent subculture has today become a fully elaborated alternative world with its own institutions and icons, sustained by a global economy.

It is surely as clear as day that what we need is another June 1976. By that I do not mean another uprising, but another epoch-changing movement inspired by a small and extraordinary group of youths. Those who led the uprisings were inspired by a fierce love of the schools that were educating them. They looked upon the forlornness of their parents’ lives, and instead of drifting into no-man’s-land, they imagined a better adulthood and fought for it. Such was the force of their quest that they altered the course of history.

How do we resurrect the generation of ’76? Township schooling is in an ungodly mess. And yet it is surely not beyond the capacity of our policy makers to resuscitate two or three dozen township high schools and to turn them into sacred institutions, the sort that might incubate an inspired and steely cadre of youth.

I am not suggesting that we can create, overnight, the disciplined Xhosa boys who dazzled the Mayers. But we would do well to remember that three decades ago a few high schools changed the world.


 * Notes From a Fractured Country, a selection of Steinberg’s Business Day journalism, has just been published by Jonathan Ball Publishers


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A657737**

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