With the help of a few visionaries, the apartheid struggle’s ‘young lions’ are learning how to come to terms with their past and move on with their lives
Charlene Smith
‘How many people have you killed?” Jabulani and Max look at each other and shake their heads. Jabu answers: “It’s impossible to know. Some you remember, but most you are not sure if it was you or others that killed them – when a lot of you are shooting at once you don’t know which bullet kills.”
Jabulani and Max (not their real names) were two of the heroes of the revolution in South Africa. They were hailed as young lions, the warriors of the barricades – yesterday’s heroes, today’s embarrassment.
Today’s criminals. Today’s unemployed. Disaffected and disenchanted, they battle to find meaning in a world that has changed. Political and military bosses who, a scant six years ago would spur them on now don’t return their calls – or sweep by in large BMWs, with wives in linen suits and layers of gold jewellery, while the young lions lounge on street corners discussing hijacking techniques, or where to score the best drugs.
The young lions are still waiting to be liberated. But some are doing it for themselves, with the help of a few visionaries. They are unlikely heroes, these visionaries: people like Heinrich Moldenhauer, the tall, stooped chief magistrate of Pretoria; Maggie Seiler of the National Peace Accord Trust; and the teachers, young people and parents who spur on the Safe Schools project of the Centre for Violence and Reconciliation of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Jabu became politically active in 1986 at the age of 12, when white national servicemen were doing house-to-house raids in the townships. “We used to go around the township on our bicycles and look where the police or army were and report back to the bigger guys.” He was recruited into the African National Congress while at boarding school.
In 1990, Jabu came home for the school holidays, “and found violence. There was talk about people needing to protect themselves. Older ANC people began getting guns.”
His mother, the second of his father’s two wives, had also moved to a new house. He felt a profound sense of alienation from his family. His mother, he says, gave him no guidance. His father was abusive.
He sought a family and political commissars provided one. By the age of 16, he was the commander of a self- defence unit (SDU).
He had 15 members in his unit. “The violence was like an unorganised war. We would do executions, opening the chest of someone while they were still alive, hanging people.”
Some of the youths had joined hit-squad gangs, hiring themselves out for R3E000 to settle private feuds. Then one gang killed a person who often loaned cars to the SDU, so Jabu’s unit was told to execute them.
“To show that we were living ghosts – out of our minds – we took one down to the field and said, ‘Who feels like shooting him?’ A youngster who was very good with soccer, he used to play for Chiefs juniors, shot that guy in the head. Until recently I used to cry every time I thought of him. He no longer plays soccer, he does drugs.
“One guy tried to run and the guys shot him in front of the houses.”
They took AK-47s and carved patterns through their victim’s body, he says, so that “when the stability unit came the next morning and tried to lift him up, his hands and arms fell off. But he was a hitman who had killed a lot of people.”
It was a refrain the SDU – and the Inkatha self-protection units would use – “we are cleaning the township of bad people” – and in the process the liberators became the oppressors.
Jabu says: “It was tough to sleep sometimes. I would see their faces. I said ‘leave me, I had to eliminate you, you were dangerous to the community’.
“My mother thought I was mad because I would be speaking alone.”
After the democratic elections, the political leaders who would race to his aid during the bloody township violence of the early 1990s were elected to national and provincial parliaments and stopped returning his calls.
Angry, and “good with a gun”, he turned to crime, hijacking, car theft. “I was the shooter. You get R5E000 for each BMW you steal, and it was possible to steal a few a day so we made good money.”
Inside, he was festering. “After the war we felt betrayed. I said it is better to do crime against my own government; it is a government for some people, not for each and every one of us. It is a government for people who went to exile and got schooling … we died for them to come and settle well.”
A friend of his mother introduced him to a psychologist working for an NGO in the townships. He went to see her and found “someone who would sit and listen to me. I broke down”.
He then went on a National Peace Accord Trust adventure trail where he says he discovered “the power of nature and my ancestors”. Eighty percent of those who have gone on trails have given up crime, prostitution or violence.
“Going up one steep slope my leg started shaking – I started having flashbacks, seeing people I had killed, blood. Nature played a big role in bringing power to my mind and heart. Even my mother said I changed.
“It put me in contact with Mother Earth. In African ideology ancestors are there for African people to connect straight to God.” He has given up crime, begun his own business – which makes peanuts compared with his criminal earnings – and is an active peacemaker.
He reflects: “A person who is angry after war is over, is a person who did not fight.
“People … who are still angry are people who did not know the feeling of killing in combat. People who fight get tired in their mind and body. They don’t want more conflict.”
His friend Max (32), brother of an Inkatha Freedom Party supremo, used to be his most bitter enemy. Max has a deep sadness about him. “My mother was an IFP member, my brother was a senior IFP member. I was not involved in politics, I focussed on football.”
But as time went by the village he lived in began separating into political camps and he was forced to take a side – even though, then and now, he despises political organisations.
In 1989 he was brought to Katorus by an IFP member, and lived in a hostel.
“If you were in a hostel and they went to war and you were left behind, they would kill you when they returned. If you did not fight they would call you impimpi (informer).
“We were being pushed by political organisations. We were young lions carrying big guns. Even today the leaders don’t want to come back and say to the youngsters, ‘What we did was wrong.’
“Guns were not taken from our youngsters; they still have them. They watch videos of the Mafia and sit on corners and talk of special ways of making money.”
Maggie Seiler of the National Peace Accord Trust says many of the young people who go on their wilderness trials feel they have no moral guidance from older people. Many of the 2E000 young people who have been put through their programmes are angry about their lost childhoods: “They want to provide protection and be protected.”
At the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, a quiet revolution is being led by Heinrich Moldenhauer, the chief magistrate. He has cut the underground cell area into a smaller space to accommodate a centre for the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The Swedish pilot project gives juveniles involved in petty crimes the choice of going to a correctional institution or undergoing an intensive three-month course to rehabilitate and learn life and money-making skills.
Moldenhauer and his team say many young offenders slowly develop violent characteristics: “They may tear the wings off an insect. They know it’s cruel, but they get away with it. At school they may kick another child in the school yard and lie about their action, and get away with it.
“A process begins where they perform increasingly anti-social actions but never have to accept consequences … and so they up the stakes.
“Outwardly they show bravado, but inwardly their self-esteem is fraying.
“They become more violent as they become more resentful of a community that allows them to get away with wrong actions.”
Moldenhauer notes: “Criminals may have nice cars and an expensive lifestyle, but people fear them, they don’t get positive recognition from the broader community. People need that to be able to live with themselves.”
The Safe Schools project of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation at the University of the Witwatersrand uses similar techniques to encourage youths at risk and entire communities to create safer societies. Operating in 40 schools in Soweto, the project sees teachers, parents and pupils co-operating to reduce violence through peer mediation and conflict resolution.
A fieldworker notes: “In some schools kids put their guns on the desk during exams to intimidate teachers; they – or teachers – come to school drunk; there are rapes on the premises.
“However, by teaching conflict resolution and peer mediation, kids learn alternatives to aggressive behaviour. We find bullies often make the best peer mediators because they’ve heard all the excuses, they have a good idea of the real situation – and they are often natural leaders who have found no other way to show their potential.”
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