The fountain of youth that doesn’t run dry with age
In South Africa, the definition of youth could fall anywhere between birth and mid- 30s. Maria McCloy considers how the lines have been blurred in today’s society
YOUTH, /ju:q/ n. (pl.youths/ju:qz/) 1. the state of being young; the period between childhood and adult age. 2. the vigour or enthusiasm, inexperience, or other characteristic of this period. 3. an early stage of development etc. 4. a young person (esp. male). 5. (pl.) young people collectively (the youth of the country). (Old English geoguth from Germanic: related to YOUNG.)
It’s not only the Oxford English Dictionary that has multiple definitions of “youth”. How you define it depends on which South African sector you form part of.
Sandile Dikeni is station manager of Y-FM, a Johannesburg station that aims to capture the “youth market” when it is up and running.
He says he’s reluctant to put “a fixed, fixed date for when you can be chucked out of that bracket called youth. Who makes the rules to now say ‘you should be kicked out of youth’?”
Judging by the age limits set in the youth wings of South African political parties, the term “youth” can apply to people up to the age of 35. Deputy Environmental Affairs Minister Peter Mokaba was in his 30s when serving as president of the African National Congress Youth League – and the newly elected president of the National Party Youth League, Max van der Watt, is 30.
The youth league, just as the National Youth Commission Act of 1996 sets youth between the ages of 14 and 35.
A definition of the age when South Africans will finally be considered grown up is likely to be on the agenda of a meeting later this month organised by National Youth Commission chair Mahlengi Bhengu.
The United Nations Children’s Fund takes its definition of a child from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: from birth to 18.
Perhaps the educational system has something to do with South Africans’ broad definitions of youth. A flawed and disrupted education system has ensured a population of ageing scholars who get to the labour market late.
Most advertisers tend to follow All Media Product Survey research figures, which define anyone older than 16 as an adult. But Jonathan Swanepoel of advertising agency Herdbuoys says he’s seen figures on unemployment referring to youths as people of 34 and under.
He sees the youth market as between the ages of 16 and 24: a market which, he says, generally has school or university in common, gets pocket money and holds to similar value systems.
After the 16-to-24 demarcation comes the 24-to-35 age bracket, a market seen to have different activities and aspirations.
Whom does television see as youth? Brenda Kali, head of youth programming at the SABC, says they cater for different age groups when it comes to children: ages three to seven, then seven to 13, and finally 13 to 16.
And youth? Sixteen to 24 is the target market of shows like Jam Alley, Inside Info and Electric Workshop. But, she adds, there is “a crossover of interests, because they aspire to what older kids are doing”.
Y-FM’s Dikeni says research done on the proposed target market for the youth- oriented station has marked their audience out as “16 to 24 with spillovers”.
But personally Dikeni sees youth as between the ages of 13 and 30. Why? Because he feels that because of the political situation, he and many others started early on making “quite major decisions” on becoming politically active.
The “notion of childhood is a very dicey one”, he says, and it varies from place to place.
For a child growing up during apartheid or the intifada, for example, will find his or her entry into youth and adulthood happens much earlier – and it would have been different from the passage from childhood to youth in a conventional Western society.
But how different is it now? Maybe the lines are blurring again – for in today’s society, children and/or youth are both at risk of catching Aids.
Abuse, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, single-parenthood and unemployment all affect young people as much as adults – and education has become as much an adult issue as one affecting only the youth.