Colin bundy is Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape and is author of numerous books and articles on South Africa.

When Nelson Mandela addressed a tumultuous crowd in Cape Town on the evening of his release from prison, he listed individuals, organizations and groups that had sustained his struggle against apartheid. "I pay tribute," he said at one point, "to the endless heroes of youth. You, the young lions. You, the young lions, have energized our struggle."

Mandela's salute to the young lions - and the roar with which it was received - acknowledged a central and persistent feature of South African politics over the last twenty years: the prominence of student and youth activism. Ever since the youth revolt which began in June 1976, student and youth activism has delivered a considerable voltage to a highly-charged circuit of resistance.

Yet in the past couple of years it has not been the heroism and courage of the youth that has attracted attention, but different aspects of the many-sided "youth crisis." In the ruling class press and broadcast media, it has become commonplace to refer to a "lost generation," and alarmist references are made to "Khmer Rouge teenagers." There has been more understanding, but no less concern, amidst social workers, teachers, church leaders and community activists who work directly with young black South Africans. There is a growing awareness of the desperate state of black schooling, steepening rates of unemployment and crime, disintegrating family structures, and the threat of AIDS.

The pro-ANC newspaper, New Nation, finds that black schools have become "sites of despair and demoralization" and that in student politics "on-the-ground active participation has collapsed." Senior office-holders in student organizations, interviewed in December, 1991, concurred. "The black student community is currently largely apolitical, demoralized and individualized," said Sipho Maseko, the President of the Azanian Students Convention (AZASCO). The "real crisis" faced by students had "created a strong sense of demoralization and frustration over the past two years" added Moeti Mpuru, National Projects Officer of the South African Students Congress (SASCO). Political organizations are concerned about their ability to hold the loyalty of their youthful supporters.

The Young Lions

What has happened, then, to the young lions? What are the components of the "youth crisis," and how serious is it? The various symptoms are sometimes conflated in a malaise described (somewhat inadequately) as "marginalized youth." This was the title of an important conference held in June 1991 under the auspices of the Joint Enrichment Program (JEP), a church initiative.

The JEP conference established overwhelmingly the magnitude, urgency and complexity of the problems confronting black youth in the 1990s. As working definitions, the conference organizers suggested that "marginalized youth" referred to people between the ages of about 13 and 30 who were typically neither in school nor work, nor exercising responsibility as household heads. They could not "easily be integrated into society's educational, economic, social or political institutions - now, or in a future South Africa."

This article identifies some of the structural features that shape the youth crisis, and how these are expressed in an increasingly violent youth culture and consciousness.

The first and most obvious structural aspect is demographic. The South African population is increasing at about 2.5% per year, which means that the total doubles every 30 years. Not only the size of the population but its shape is significant. The demographic profile is typical of a period of accelerated growth in that a very large proportion of the population is youthful. Half the population is under the age of 21. Nearly 44% of Africans are under the age of 15. In the year 2,000, fully 60% of the African population will be aged twenty or less.

Political considerations entirely aside, these figures guarantee that in the foreseeable future there will be very large numbers of children and young adults with a wide range of wants and deprivations. They ensure a continuing and acute pressure on educational resources, and they mean that schools are likely to remain crucibles of discontent.

The second and equally inescapable pressure on youth is economic. South African capitalism is in the grips of a recession whose depth and persistence have been abundantly documented. The economic factor with the most direct implications for youth marginality is unemployment. Formal unemployment in South Africa today stands at about 42%. In October 1991, the Development Bank of South Africa released staggering figures: over the past five years, only 8.4% of nearly 400,000 people entering the job market found work.

The great majority of these new job seekers are of course school leavers. Unemployment is a mass phenomenon, but is visited with particular ferocity on the age bracket 16-30. Up to 90% of the unemployed may be under the age of 30. A financial journalist concluded recently that "a more accurate name for the unemployment crisis is the youth unemployment crisis."

The Education Crisis

The third structural pressure point is the education crisis. The disaster in black schooling has of course been long in the making, and is rooted directly in the system of Bantu Education introduced in the 1950s. This provided for rigid educational segregation and profound inequalities. Although spending on black education has increased substantially in recent years, the state still spends about $160 a year on each black student, as against over $1,000 per white student.

Schools in black townships and Bantustans are overcrowded, under-equipped, poorly staffed, and desperately short of funds. Only five per cent of black children who enter the school system graduate from high school: 60% do not complete primary school.

An already dismal situation was transformed in scale during the 1970s and 1980s. For the first time, high school education for the blacks became a mass phenomenon, and pressure on existing resources grew worse. In the mid-1980s, politicized black school students demonstrated their rejection of the system by boycotting their schools. Hundreds of thousands of scholars simply dropped out of school; many who stayed or returned received patchy, disrupted, deteriorated schooling. Increasingly, educationists warn that the "culture of learning" is being eroded in black schools. "Simply put," said one, "this means that students and teachers alike have lost all faith in the system."

Fourthly, the demographic, economic and educational features outlined above will increasingly be concentrated in the cities. The collapse of "influx control," plus rural poverty, makes pell-mell urbanization inevitable. People will pour into the cities even while unemployment rises and resources shrink. Many of the new city dwellers will live as squatters; already, an estimated seven million people live in squatter communities. The demands for housing, health care, food and jobs will be intense - and a very high proportion of the new urban population will be youthful. Specifically urban phenomena of youth culture - like criminal gangs and street children - will reach new levels.

Perhaps the most widely-noted result of these pressures has been that, for many young South Africans, life has become increasingly violent. The international media have concentrated upon political violence; but statistically, this is dwarfed by extremely high levels of criminal violence. Common to political and criminal violence is that black youths feature prominently as both perpetrators and victims.

This observation needs to be put in context. South African society is permeated by violence. Segregation and apartheid made industrialization in South Africa a particularly violent and traumatic process. In addition to high levels of state repression in recent decades is a less apparent but palpable violence of unnecessary death, disease and degradation stemming from racially discriminatory policies. South Africa has extremely high rates of alcohol and drug addiction, of motor vehicle and industrial accidents, of suicide, homicide and family murders. It has the highest known incidence of rape in the world.

It was against this background that political violence became more visible and intense in the 1980s, with mass based political protest and heightened state repression its most obvious indices. The massive involvement of young people in political protest also made them mass observers, victims and vectors of violence.

Social workers and psychologists speak of "brutalization"; an alternative term might be the internalization of violence. The central fact is that violence generates violence; that brutality is a learned response. Levels of socialized or learned violence among children and youth increased dramatically during the 1980s. Parental, school and other institutional controls were weakened or swept aside. Dangerously polarized and simplified forms of politics developed. People were killed because they wore the wrong colour T-shirt or walked on the wrong side of a boundary road.

Of those who drew attention to the brutalizing of a generation, none did so more eloquently than Percy Qoboza, editor of the mass circulation black newspaper, City Press, in April 1986:

If it is true that a people's wealth is its children, then South Africa is bitterly, tragically poor. If it is true that a nation's future is its children, than we have no future and deserve none . . . [We] are a nation at war with its future . . . For we have turned our children into a generation of fighters . . . What we are witnessing is the growth of a generation which has the courage to reject the cowardice of its parents . . . to fight for what should be theirs, by right of birth. There is a dark, terrible beauty in that courage. It is a source of great pride - pride that we, who have lived under apartheid, can produce children who refuse to do so. But it is also a source of great shame . . . that [this] is our heritage to our children: The knowledge of how to die, and how to kill.

These words were written at the height of the repression, during the State of Emergency. There are grounds for hope now that were not available then. But South Africans cannot ignore the realities of brutalization amongst their youth, any more than they can afford to overlook the grave social and structural pressures that threaten to deepen the alienation of the young.

The question of what policy responses are appropriate and possible cannot be explored here. Very briefly, it may be useful simply to identify some of the most obvious areas that will engage policy makers.

* First, there is an acute need for imaginative and effective social welfare programs that deal directly with some of the effects of youth marginalization. At the JEP conference there was a call for purposive state intervention of behalf of school drop-outs on the lines of "youth brigades," "civilian conservation corps," and the like.

* Secondly, an area of absolute priority is the transformation of South Africa's educational system. More resources will have to be directed to schooling, and the existing clutter of racially distinct school systems must be replaced by a unitary, non-racial system. These are necessary but not sufficient responses to the crisis; the long term challenge is how to ensure equality of access to learning in a society so profoundly unequal as South Africa is - and will continue to be, even after every apartheid stature is scrapped.

* The third area which virtually defines itself is job creation. Speakers at the JEP conference identified ways in which community organizations, employers, trade unions, donor agencies and foreign aid can help; but the scale of the problem is so massive that many believe it can only be resolved by job creation on a mass scale by government. South Africans have been "rediscovering" the New Deal experiments in job creation during the 1930s, with an emphasis on programs that would simultaneously create jobs and build much-needed schools, roads and houses. Calls for programs like this have been supported, on the one hand, by advisers to institutions of finance capital and, on the other hand, by left-wing researchers close to COSATU.

* Crucially, none of these policies will work unless they actively involve people at the grassroots level. By any standards, extraordinary levels of dynamism and social purpose were achieved in community-based organizations in South Africa in the 1980s. Similar levels of mobilization will have to be achieved in the 1990s. Winning the commitment of a new generation of young activists is essential. The young lions who helped tear down apartheid must be actively involved in constructing the future.

Although they can be separately identified and discussed, the problems that make up the "youth crisis" are simply a subset of the problems that will confront the post-apartheid government. That government will have to distribute resources more equitably than any previous South African regime has even envisaged - at a time when those resources are cruelly straitened. It will have to repair grievous damage to basic social institutions, buffeted by expectations for the future while it inherits the follies of the past.

This is a daunting prospect. But the success of any popularly elected government in South Africa will depend in large measure upon how it recognizes and responds to the problems that confront young South Africans on a mass scale. Only then might South Africa become a nation at peace with its future.

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