No country for young men and women

Last month renowned scholar Mahmood Mamdani wrote “An African Reflection of Tahrir Square” where he linked the Egyptian uprising to the 1976 Soweto uprisings.

“Ordinary people stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, armed guerrillas, with the people cheering from the stands, but as a popular movement with ordinary people as key participants. The potential of popular struggle lay in sheer numbers, guided by a new imagination and new methods of struggle. Finally, this new imagination laid the basis for a wider unity.”

June 16 is a special day in Africa — Day of the African Child. It was inaugurated by the Organisation for African Unity (now African Union) in 1991 as a way of honouring the Soweto students who protested against the apartheid regime. Late activist Bantu Steve Biko said “the logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country … to a large extent, the evil-doers have succeeded in producing at the output end of their machine a kind of black man who is a man only in form. This is the extent to which the process of dehumanisation has advanced.” This is essentially what the students were protesting against — they were on a mission to regain their humanity and reclaim their dignity.

After the fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, it seemed quite fashionable to ask which regime, especially south of the Sahara, was next. Robert Mugabe? The African National Congress at some point perhaps? Was Muammar Gaddafi going down too?

But those obsessed with wanting to see dictators like Mugabe forced out of office Egyptian-style must consider the lives of the many people, mostly young, who put their lives on the line. Who remembers the self-employed Tunisian graduate Mohammed Bouazizi? Despite setting the Arab revolution on fire, literally, Bouazizi’s memory has been relegated to the dustbin.

This is a familiar story of a doomed youth whose sacrifices for a better society go widely unappreciated or at worst, unremembered and unrewarded. Victims of the Bisho massacre here in South Africa; Nyadzonia victims in Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s war of liberation; young Libyans fighting the tyranny of Gaddafi; the women who had to go through virginity tests at Tahrir Square are only alive in feminist discourse and most young people who delivered Tunisia and Egypt still sit unemployed, unsure of what the future holds.

You can almost feel the pain of late Zimbabwean poet Dambudzo Marechera when he wrote in Oracle of the Povo: Her vision’s scrubland

Of out-of-work heroes

Who yesterday a country won

And today poverty tasted.

It would seem as if young people are only good at being drivers of change, the mass that makes things happen but unfortunately does not live to see, pluck and taste the fruit of its labour. Or maybe no one is really standing in the way of young people but they have become victims of their own failure to be led by what Mamdani calls “a new imagination and new methods of struggle”; the failure to identify what the current struggles are and how they ought to be fought.

South African youth, for example, have no apartheid monster to fight any more because the likes of Biko and Chris Hani did back then. But is it safe to assume that there are no other fierce struggles post 1976? Is it enough to assemble a few successful youth (mostly black) in a radio studio every Youth Day and have them wax lyrical about the tortured past, their present that is “alive” with possibilities and how they are part of an uncertain future?

What makes that future uncertain, for me, is the reluctance to apply critical thinking to the lived experiences of African youth, varied as they are. How has their education been affected by the IMF-driven structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s for instance? Where do young white South Africans fit in the Youth Day discourse? How can young people stay alive and not succumb to the Aids scourge? What is being learnt from the rich and inspiring legacies of Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara and leaders in that league?

We live on a continent that has a rich history. Perhaps it is the failure to critically use memory (the true history of where we come from) as a weapon in the new struggle that is perpetuating some of these breathtaking failures to deal with abject poverty, sky-high unemployment and disease among youths.

We can only invent a sustainable future for young people when we strategically use memory as a weapon, a shield and guide. The caution here is not to be guided by the selective and revisionist memory of the rogues who looted the national purses and hold their people at ransom via intimidation, assault and murder. After all as Frantz Fanon said “the future will have no pity for those men (and women) who, possessing the exceptional privilege of being able to speak words of truth to their oppressors, have taken refuge in an attitude of passivity, of mute indifference and sometimes of cold complicity”.