Rebel and leader: John Tengo Jabavu (left) and his son Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu (about 1903). Photo: Wikipedia
The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation’s annual National Youth Essay, Poetry & Art Competition Against Racism winners in each category have been collated. This is the introduction to the 2024 winners’ booklet.
The young people of every generation must grapple with what it means to be fully human and how best their society should be structured and move forward. And in the book project Power & The Pen, commemorating 200 years of writing in the indigenous languages of our country, I have been reminded just how successful the generations before us have been in defining future paths.
On 3 November 1884, the brilliant 25-year-old John Tengo Jabavu, one of the early generations of mission-educated Africans, brought out the first issue of his newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, or Native Opinion, as it was called in English. He and the “school people” at the time were becoming increasingly critical of the paternalism of the missionary institutions and press in the Cape Colony so they set up their own political organisations and media platforms to fight for African rights. Their motto was “dubula ngosiba” (shoot with the pen). They levelled so much criticism against the existing missionary newspaper, Isigidimi Sama Xhosa, that one observer compared it with a warrior whose enemies had hurled so many spears into his body that he looked like a porcupine.
The founding of Imvo was an important step in the development of the freedom struggle in South Africa. It and the independent black newspapers that followed also became vehicles for indigenous writers and poets such as Jonas Ntsiko and the famous SEK Mqhayi to express themselves in their own languages, thus preserving rich, expressive intellectual cultures and ideas — excluded from the classrooms and bookshops of the colonial and apartheid periods — that we can draw on today.
There are many examples after Jabavu of restless young minds that were in the forefront of new ideas and bringing about lasting change in our country. Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Mannya, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Regina Twala and Cissie Gool wrote, argued and lobbied for greater rights for women in the early 20th century. Anton Lembede, AP Mda and the Youth League thinkers pointed to new ways of political thinking and struggle in 1943. In 1976, the youth of Soweto rose up in much more forceful ways in opposition to inferior education than Jabavu’s generation a hundred years before.
More recently, there is the example of the post-1994 gender and social movement activists, and the students in the #RhodesMustFall and Black Lives Matter movements of the 2010s, who started challenging cosy assumptions about the arrival of precious freedom and our still-young democracy.
The above examples of young South African thinkers making a difference underline the point that words and ideas do not simply get plucked out of the air. Rather, they emerge from life experiences and social processes that help give meaning to language. Against this background, we welcome and celebrate the contributions of all those young writers, poets and artists who have contributed to the 2024 National Essay Writing Competition Against Racism. We also thank the staff of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation for their hard work in organising this and other youth programmes.
The thoughts and ways of seeing of the young people we encounter in this publication reflect in fascinating ways the experiences, learnings and reflection of our youth at a time when our country and the world are facing mind-boggling change and challenges.
Words and phrases jump out at one from these pages: “rage, vulnerability and awareness”; “to be a Born Free is to live life in a constant state of growth and grief”; “hear our cry”; “echoes of yesterday threaded into our foresight”; “inter-generational trauma”; parents passing down prejudice; being aware of how privilege operates, “starting with me” (from a young black woman in the rural areas); “intersectionality helps us to understand”; “determined to forge our own paths”; “how are Born Frees free without having a proper education?”, “responsibility rests on the shoulders of youth to reconcile”; influence pop culture, don’t be influenced by it; representations of the past and present can reinforce racism, and “we exist in a new-fashioned moment”. From each of the contributions here I found something that could be the topic of deep debate and interest.
There is a depth of awareness and a sense of agency in these works that gives hope. But, as the haunted faces in the artworks show, this is also an age of anxiety, as much as one of possibility.
How could it be otherwise? For nearly two years defenceless children, women and men, families, communities in Gaza are bombed and brutalised daily in an unimaginable filmed genocide which dehumanises all of us. The “land of the free” provides the 2 000kg bombs and the immunity and impunity that make the genocide possible — self-proclaimed upholder of “human rights” for decades, it now trashes human rights to the extent that the word as a Western definition has lost its meaning. In a post-truth digital world, right is wrong, wrong is right. “Us and them” tropes have replaced perspectives and ethics that underline the essential unity of humanity — and the notions of solidarity, empathy and service made great by the generation of Mandela and Kathrada.
The rapid changes brought about by the AI revolution with its seeming fellow travellers — authoritarianism and a bullying surveillance capitalism — are speeding us into an unpredictable future. As if this is not too much, there is the extinction threat. In the words of Christiana Figueres (Time, 30 January 2023), “General disregard for our role as guardians of the global commons have altered the Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans so substantially that we are literally living ourselves out of our life-providing environment [and] this is the most perilous moment in human history.”
When I worked with Ahmed Kathrada in the 1990s it was a time of optimism and societal spring cleaning and rebuilding. That was the time the notorious Robben Island prison, in which Kathrada had been incarcerated for so long, was closed down and we started the Robben Island Museum. On the opening day, 1 January 1997, Kathrada and the representatives of the former prisoners were the special guests on the first boat to the island. At the locked doors, the keys to the former maximum-security prison were handed to the brave freedom fighter and former islander, Lizo “Bright” Ngqungwana. A child was asked to help Lizo put the keys into the lock.
This had been a request from Uncle Kathy and his comrades — they often recalled that what they missed most while “inside” was the sound of children’s voices.
They still felt the pain that for 16 years, 20 years, some as long as 23 years, they had not been allowed to have physical contact with or hold in their arms a child, even their own. Children represent innocence and immortality, and this profound deprivation was being acknowledged.
A noisy turn of the key. Then the loud clanging prison doors were thrown open. Buzzing voices and small barefoot feet pattered into the passages. A ballet of freedom.
That day, we symbolically closed the book on centuries of pain, incarceration, censorship and mean control in that space. Our goal was to turn the island into a place of hope for humanity; to open up this closed environment — also figuratively in the sense of minds; to convert it into place of learning and education, healing and meaning; a place of universalism and inclusivity, which reflected in Kathrada’s words “the triumph of the human spirit” over adversity and bigotry.
This was going to be the African century. A time when apartheid became a memory rather than an all-round presence. But could the dream continue in such a heady way? For both the country and Robben Island Museum? Almost inevitably, the answer was “no”.
South Africa and the public mood are very different today. Young people are growing up in a time of deep uncertainty. The country faces multiple crises. It is crying out for a second transition. How to build an inclusive and stable country in a time of pervasive poverty and exclusion which has left many of the systemic features of apartheid intact? The huge challenges that lie ahead will fall on the shoulders of South Africa’s youth.
To all the participants and those whose contributors have been included in this publication, what you have produced is of real importance.
Follow your path. The struggle against racism and the systemic or overt violence that always accompanies it has never been as important as it is today. If the task seems too overwhelming, remember how the 19th century equivalent of the digital natives of today at the time of JT Jabavu found a way forward in a wholly new colonial world. Remember how Kathrada and his generation faced with courage the challenges of their time to make real a democracy in 1994 that the world had thought impossible.
Professor André Odendaal is a member of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation Board and the vice-chancellor’s writer-in-residence at the University of the Western Cape.