South Africa: The Lost Generation

By Scott MacLeod/Johannesburg

He says to call him "Che Guevara." He lives in Zola, one of the ghetto districts that make up the vast black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. At 22 he is a hardened veteran of the struggle against apartheid. He has killed "enemies of the people" and is prepared to kill again.

Seven years ago he became a supporter of the then outlawed African National Congress. With other teenagers he started stoning police vehicles. When leaders of the liberation movement sought to make the townships ungovernable, he became one of the enforcers. If he caught a family paying rent to municipal authorities in defiance of the rent boycott, he would serve them with an eviction notice. "If they refused to go," he says, "we'd speak to them in the language of the struggle. We'd kill them and burn their house down."

There are millions of young men, some like Che, in South Africa, a country's lost generation. Nelson Mandela hailed black youth as the "Young Lions," who took over as the shock troops of the revolution while he and other aging black leaders were locked away in prison. The "comrades," as they called themselves, battled the state's security forces for control of the townships, rooted out informers and sellouts, and spearheaded worker stay-aways and consumer boycotts. It was their militancy and surging growth, as much as anything else, that finally convinced the white government in Pretoria that apartheid's days were numbered.

Freedom has come for Mandela, and it may be nearing for all blacks who long to rule in their own land. But the youth are emerging as apartheid's saddest and potentially most dangerous legacy: as many as 5 million young people, from their early 30s down to perhaps 10, mostly school dropouts who are unable to get jobs and unprepared to make constructive contributions to society. They are the deprived, activists, layabouts or thieves. They live in bleak urban townships, where the standard four-room house shelters an average of 10 people. They are often murderous supporters of rival groups like the A.N.C., the Pan Africanist Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. What unites them is lives that have known little besides political conflict. When the day of liberation comes, what will they do?

They have learned all too well how to imitate the violence of a state that has often used live ammunition on defenseless protesters and fired tear gas to disperse groups of small children. They have lived in a world, says the Rev. Frank Chikane, head of the South African Council of Churches, "of military operations and night raids, of roadblocks and body searches, where friends and parents get carried away in the middle of the night."

The fiery images of death have become part of their normal experience. Many of them, in the words of Drum magazine editor Barney Cohen, are capable of killing at the drop of a match. They have developed a youth culture of alienation and intolerance that may be more destructive, in its sheer scale, than anything seen in Beirut, Belfast or the Gaza Strip.

Apartheid, by robbing black community and family life of all authority and cohesion, is to blame. But so, to some extent, is the type of fight that blacks chose to wage against white oppression. For years parents have been standing back while their children moved to the front trenches of the freedom struggle.

The youth rebellion began on June 16, 1976, when the schoolchildren of Soweto, seething over the inferior instruction known as Bantu education, rose up in protest against the state's edict that their lessons must be learned in Afrikaans, the language of the ruling whites. The initial battles left more than 400 dead, but the uprising was never completely quelled. In 1984 the comrades of the still simmering townships rebelled again, setting off a series of violent protests that killed more than 2,000 over the next two years and prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. The turmoil presented Pretoria with grave political problems, including the imposition of stronger international sanctions, which President F.W. de Klerk is still trying to solve.

But the endless conflict also helped transform black children. As the youth population mushroomed, so did its power to do violence. Now there are 28.5 million blacks in the country, half of them under the age of 14, many of them with no notion of how to live in a peaceful world. Black parents are frustrated at their inability to get their children to return to school. "Liberation now; education later" became the slogan of the 1980s, but it only promises to make the 1990s that much harder.

Spending its days in the streets, the lost generation alarms many black community leaders as much as it does white government officials. Perhaps half the urban youth eschew political activism, preferring to loaf, play soccer, drink beer and shoot dice. Thousands upon thousands of others are tough political activists. They seem to roam the townships like so many deputy sheriffs, setting down the law of the street and enforcing it with harsh punishment.

Although the practice has died down recently, teenage judges presided over so-called people's courts that almost casually handed out death sentences to suspected traitors. A youth invention that has not disappeared is "necklacing," the method of mob execution in which a gasoline-doused rubber tire is thrown around a suspected traitor's body and set ablaze.

"Chris," 26, has no interest in working and little time for politics. He is too busy stealing. He started with cars, moved on to breaking into houses in the affluent white suburbs and eventually to armed robbery.

He claims that he would never kill for money. But he admits that he has killed out of revenge. After burying a friend who had been murdered, he and a gang of comrades armed with pangas went after the youth they suspected of the killing. "We chopped him up," Chris says. "His head was over here. His hands were over there."

Black crime is soaring. Poverty has removed the stigma from stealing, and young people are no longer afraid of the police. Blacks have invented a name for the new youthful criminals: they are the comtsotsis, gangsters masquerading as political activists. In Soweto, which has 3 million residents, an epidemic of car thefts and armed holdups has left many people cowering in their homes after sunset. The township ranks among the murder capitals of the world: in 1989 Soweto reported 1,383 killings, compared with 1,900 in New York City and 434 in Washington.

Gangs conduct classes for young boys in the fine arts of car theft and burglary. They use Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles to carry out bank robberies and payroll heists. Much of the crime is vicious. A bunch of street toughs recently murdered an elderly New Zealand tourist and stole his wristwatch after he made a wrong turn and wound up in Soweto after dark. "This is because black people are suffering," a black burglar told a white Johannesburg man as he robbed his house and raped a woman friend.

The most worrisome trend is the readiness of young rival activists to kill each other. In the province of Natal alone, more than 4,000 people have died since clashes erupted in 1986 between followers of the A.N.C. and the Zulu- based Inkatha movement, headed by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Instead of inspiring a new era of peace, Mandela's return has seen the fighting spread to Soweto and other townships encircling Johannesburg. In 1990 nearly 3,500 were killed in black communal violence, the worst year's toll in modern South African history.

Prince, 34, steered clear of politics to take advantage of economic opportunities opening up for blacks. He became a bank teller -- until his world collapsed in 1983 when the bank was robbed by a group of his friends and police accused him of being the inside man.

After serving four years in prison, Prince is trying to build a future for his family. But he is filled with resentment when he sees the stark contrasts between black Alexandra township and the nearby white suburb of Sandton. "Even if you are blindfolded, you know you are in Alex by the smell," he says. "But get in your car, and in five minutes -- look at the mansions, smell the flowers, see the BMWs and the overflowing grocery trolleys in the supermarkets. It can make you cry."

The dormant A.N.C. Youth League is being revived to bring the comrades under the movement's umbrella. The league's slogan -- Fight! Produce! Learn! -- echoes the mixed signals that A.N.C. leaders are sending to the youth. Mandela has been urging them to go back to school, but the A.N.C. still employs young students in boycotts that keep them in the streets.

< Worse, the mass-action campaign includes attacks on black municipal councilors and black policemen -- part of apartheid's crumbling system -- that encourage the perpetuation of black-against-black violence. In 1990 there were more than 400 recorded attacks on black councilors and policemen, resulting in at least 25 deaths. How will the young react when black politicians and police are representing a black government?

These militant strategies may keep youths motivated for the cause, but they do little to prepare them for a painful reality ahead. The "new South Africa," as Mandela and De Klerk both like to call it, may in many ways be as bad or worse than the old.

Blacks will have the vote and a right to equal opportunity. The new political system will presumably be a democracy. The black middle class of entrepreneurs, lawyers and other professionals that has sprung up under apartheid will grow. There is a reasonable chance for racial harmony, since even the most militant blacks accept the right of whites to be fellow South Africans.

But the huge economic disparities between whites and blacks will continue for years. A majority of South Africa's blacks are desperately poor: at least 7 million live in destitute squatter camps. They will see few dramatic improvements anytime soon. Black unemployment, as high as 41% in some areas, is unlikely to fall quickly. "The future looks extremely bleak," says John Kane-Berman, head of the Johannesburg-based South African Institute of Race Relations. "There is every possibility that the average person will be materially worse off than he is now."

Such a future would be a profound shock to the lost generation. The comrades seem to take it for granted that they have earned the right to the easy life- style enjoyed by whites. They assume that once the A.N.C. controls the government, the benefits will start flowing to blacks.

But blacks lack the education and skills needed to expand the economy significantly in the short term. "There is absolutely no way that those expectations will be met," says Kehla Shubane, 32, a researcher at the University of Witwatersrand. Under optimal conditions, it could take South Africa between five and 10 years to begin making tangible progress. If adopted, the A.N.C.'s socialist-oriented economic proposals -- popular with the lost generation -- would only postpone material improvement.

Because the black leadership is afraid to alienate them, the restless youth may exert a baleful influence over the negotiations for South Africa's future political and economic system. "The youth support us because we speak their language -- housing, education, jobs," says Jackie Selebi, a member of the A.N.C.'s national executive committee. "As soon as we stop demanding that, we will run into trouble."

This is exactly the kind of talk that makes whites insist on some kind of veto power under a new system. The existence of so many uneducated and unemployed blacks, says government negotiator Stoffel van der Merwe, "makes it more important to have a constitution in which the power of the majority is very definitely subject to checks and balances."

One way or another, the next generation of blacks can expect to win control of their lives. That will be a great day in South Africa. But no new political system -- at least in the near future -- will be able to fulfill the hopes of the generation that has already been lost.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town