The wheels have definitely come off this thing. This week I have had to report to a bunch of youth-like characters who have temporarily taken over the editorship of this newspaper — all in the name of Youth Day.
I suppose things could have been worse. And I guess you have to remember that we were all youths once, sometime way back in the mists of time. Besides, youthfulness is relative.
I recall that the late, great Walter Sisulu still insisted on being a member of the African National Congress Youth League when he was well into his mid-40s, back in the 1950s or thereabouts. After all, someone had to keep an eye on the young and give them a sense of direction.
It was the same ageing youth league led, along with Sisulu, by Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and others, who overthrew the old guard in the mid-1940s and set the ANC on a more radical course, which ultimately led to the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s and, after the banning of the movement, to the armed struggle. The rest is history.
The present celebrations of Youth Day on June 16 do not, however, pay homage to those early, grey suited, brown suede shoed days of the 1940s and 1950s. It hardly needs to be said that they celebrate the youth uprisings of two or three generations later — when first the youth of Soweto and Langa, and then in townships across the rest of the country, took to the streets in
gym slips and delelahs, with stones and whatever else they could lay their hands on, and shook not
just South Africa but the world
with a new mood of determination to end this apartheid nonsense.
Those of us who were in exile watched the drama unfold on television sets in our living rooms and bedsits far away. The aweful, awesome sight of smoke and flames rising over the townships, and the fierce reaction of the apartheid regime as it launched a full military invasion in retaliation, was inspiring. We felt like we had been sitting on our hands all these years, discussing the National Question and how the Freedom Charter would be implemented in cramped committees in people’s houses or, at mostly uninspiring, half-full mass meetings at the Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square.
We, like the Vorster regime, had no inkling that all this was about to explode way down south. The youthful blood in the streets, the reckless body language, and the necklacings that were to follow at a later stage were something totally unexpected. We had to sit up and take note of what our peers (I was 22 at the time) were like back there.
A new generation of leaders had given birth to itself. We had to get our heads round who they were and how they were thinking. Their rhetoric, caught in running interviews with BBC and ITN news crews based at the Carlton hotel, but braving the township streets for a good story, was raw and uncompromising as compared to the mild-mannered press releases that were cranked sporadically out of the ANC office.
Some of these youthful leaders would survive to tell the tale, and even rise to high office in the New South Africa. Some were not to make it.
Tsietsi Mashinini was soon fingered as the ‘leader” of the Soweto students, at large in the streets as their former high schools burned behind them. It soon became too hot for him and his colleagues, and they slipped in exile.
They hooked up with the ANC somewhere in Southern Africa, and Tsietsi and two of his lieutenants eventually showed up in cold, unfriendly London — which is where we came face to face with this new, stern, baby-faced reality for the first time. They were dressed in identical denim dungarees, striped shirts, bomber jackets and woollen hats. They were tough teetotallers, and rarely deigned, in those early days, to crack a smile as they sized us up. We felt debauched and flabby.
We had to get our act together in a hurry, learn a new language of serious revolution, if we were to have any chance of keeping abreast — or even being allowed to participate in our own struggle.
The ANC, to its credit (and thanks to the skill and foresight of Tambo, that youth leader of former years) eventually lumbered into gear and absorbed not just the new rhetoric, but also the hundreds of thousands of angry young black South Africans who threw themselves pugnaciously into its arms. The movement gradually instilled its hard-earned sense of discipline, and regained the initiative — not without a struggle.
Umkhonto weSizwe, languishing in an angry slumber since the abortive Wankie Campaign of the 1960s, took on a new lease of life. The youth were not inclined to hang around in the camps in Tanzania and Zambia like the ageing, paunchy cadres of the Luthuli Detachment they found there. They wanted the tools and weapons of war, and were going to march back within a matter of months, whether the leadership liked it or not.
It changed the nature of the armed struggle, and eventually became a force for the sinister military might of South Africa to be more than irritated by. That, and skilled diplomacy (led by Thabo Mbeki), finally brought apartheid to the bargaining table.
It is fitting that we salute this achievement. And I suppose even I have to say, however grudgingly, that it is therefore fitting that yet another youthful generation should take control of us here in the newsroom — for the week that is dedicated to them, but no more.
They’ll see. There’s lots of life in us old dogs yet.