Attempts to revive the Boy Scout movement in Gauteng are underway following falling membership numbers
Thebe Mabanga
There was a time, in many townships, when the sight of young boys clad in khaki uniforms was a common one. Boy Scouts have always enjoyed a curious and ambivalent relationship with society, soliciting admiring stares and inane questions at every turn. But these days, they are a rare sight indeed.
Arrowe Park, one of Gauteng’s six major training centres for scouts, illustrates the tale of the scouts in black townships. The inscription on the wooden walls of one of its rooms, called the (lion’s) cub den, reads: “8th Kwa-Thema [scouts troop] was here.” But where is it now?
The sad truth is that the 8th Kwa-Thema has disbanded – along with many other troops. It would appear that the spirit of selflessly giving up their time to help the less privileged is on the wane among teenagers. The thought of spending their time using mud to boil an egg or camping in less than ideal conditions after hiking for the whole day on a diet of raisins, Provitas and warm water is no more.
However, there are attempts to revive the scouts movement in the country. The annual Gauteng Kontiki raft-building contest that took place on the first weekend of March at Murray Park on the East Rand is a case in point.
Eighty troops entered the contest. Along the shore of the lake, troops from predominantly white areas assembled their rafts to prepare for the competition. A few metres away, troops from nearby townships also camped for the whole weekend. Only they did not build rafts – they seemed oblivious to the proceedings, content to do nothing more than play around the swimming pool.
The non-participation of some of these youths in raft building illustrates some of the problems faced by scouting: an acute shortage of adult leaders; lack of support from parents; and a tearing of the social fabric that has contributed to a rise in crime and distracting juveniles.
Where scouting thrived it was largely due to an efficient school system, where schools offered their premises and teachers were allocated to run troops. In Tembisa on the East Rand, for example, troops used to operate from most primary schools and some high schools. Now there are none.
“When I started a troop here in 1988, scouting was dead,” says Felix Kunene, a teacher at Jabulani Technical High School in Soweto. Having had brief contact with the movement in his childhood, Kunene became involved in reviving scouts at Soweto’s King Zwelithini Primary and later at Jabulani High.
In 1994, he was part of a delegation touring England, Sweden and Denmark to study trends in the movement. He is now deputy regional commissioner for the West Rand and says he has to run troops in five separate schools on all week-day afternoons, starting in Kagiso on Mondays and ending in Mohlakeng on Fridays.
Unfortunately, Kunene belongs to a dying breed. His efforts notwithstanding, activity in his region remains sporadic. For one thing, his region has 120 boys, a dishearteningly low figure for a sprawling settlement like the West Rand, which includes districts like Soweto, Kagiso and Bekkersdal. A district in the East Rand, on the other hand, has 200 boys.
The East Rand’s deputy regional commissioner, Charles Lebeko, told the Mail & Guardian that “the main problem that scouting has is the lack of adult leaders and the rise in unemployment in black communities. Many teachers lost interest in guiding boys in the wake of a rise in militancy in the teaching profession as a result of increased trade union participation.”
Lebeko also attributes the decline of the scouts to the economic situation that has made it increasingly difficult for parents to support their children with basics like uniforms, annual subscriptions and camping equipment as well as luxuries such as material for events like Kontiki.
The annual subscriptions have been, for a long time, a contentious issue among troops in the townships. The boys have always lacked conviction that they benefit from paying them. As a result, failure to pay the current reasonable rate of R25 per boy per year is really more about attitude than it is about affordability. In 1992, there were 14 000 subscription-paying scouts in Gauteng. At last count there were only 6 500, some from the 80 raft-building troops.
Kunene, on the other hand, views the rise of youth political organisations and the increased participation – especially by former scouts – in other youth orientated NGOs, especially after the 1994 elections, as debilitating factors against the scouts.
However, there are success stories. In Mpumalanga numbers have grown from 248 to 1 000 since 1997, when the movement was relaunched from the old Northern Transvaal. Inroads have been made in townships such as Kwa-Nyamazane and Kwa- Bokweni, and plans are afoot to expand to Secunda and Groblersdal.
Dee Chandler, the Mpumalanga area secretary, attributes this success to a committed adult leadership and what is known as the Phakamani (Zulu for rise) programme – a series of three videos used by a full-time field organiser to recruit members. Mpumalanga receives extensive support from Scouting Nederland and Scouting Germany.
Another province to benefit from Phakamani is KwaZulu-Natal. Under the leadership of Goodenough Dlamini, the country’s assistant chief scout, KwaZulu- Natal is the country’s largest scouting province with over three-quarters of the country’s scouts coming from there. Their success is based on the school system and involvement of businesses in the community, churches and the members’ parents. The province has also found that schools with a strong scouting culture do well in matric exams.
In July last year, the South African Scouts Association hosted 1 200 delegates at the 35th triennial World Scouts Congress in Durban.
“I would not know what is happening at an operational level, but the movement needs to adapt to survive,” says Nkwenkwe Nkomo, chief scout of South Africa. Nkomo notes that conservative attitudes have stunted growth, making South Africa, along with Zimbabwe (quite predictably), the last countries to open scouting to girls (previously they could only be Girl Guides).
Nkomo believes that scouting generates goodwill. “For last year’s congress, we managed to raise R1,7-million in four months from local donors only. There is no reason why this should not translate into a willingness for firms to make donations – money, pallets, unused ropes, poles and drums – to troops in their areas to help them undertake projects,” Nkomo said.
However, Nkomo emphasised that the fundraising should be backed up by administrative support and financial management, and parents have an important role to play in this aspect.
“Unfortunately,” says West Rand commissioner Kunene, “black parents do not want to take responsibility.”
In November last year, Minister of Education Kader Asmal, himself a former scout, challenged senior scout leaders to “turn schools into centres of activity” every afternoon.
Nkomo said scouts have relevance in contemporary South African society. “Scouts can go into the community and give basic first aid lessons,” he suggests. “They can also acquire vocational skills and, with the help of a professional, pass these on to the community.” For his part, Nkomo has an undertaking from corporate funding. What he requires are people to establish and help maintain structures that will receive and properly utilise these funds.