In June 2024, I was part of a workshop on epistemic reparations and the right to be known in post-apartheid South Africa held both in the city of Johannesburg and at Uncle Tom’s Community Centre, Soweto. It was a gathering of academics from North America, Europe and Africa. Also present were former freedom fighters – including Antoinette Sithole, the sister of Hector Pieterson, and Mongane Serote – as well as youth leaders from the 1976 Soweto uprising, such as Seth Mazibuko. For me, the event was a reminder of the unforgettable role that the youth played in resisting the colonial domination of the apartheid regime and its implications for fracturing both the cultural identity and development of young black South Africans. It was also a moment of understanding and reflection on the youth condition during and after apartheid in South Africa and on the continent at large, for the youth condition in today’s Africa is partly shaped by coloniality. 

Highlighting and reflecting on the nature of the challenges of South African youth 

As South Africa commemorates yet another youth month and the challenges facing its youth persist or worsen 50 years after, it is time again to reflect even deeper on the nature and uniqueness of these challenges. South Africa’s youth unemployment ranks highest in Africa and one of the highest in the world. Its youth-related crime and violence are at a high rate. There are also high economic disparities with the South African youth mostly bearing the brunt. In the context of identity erosion, the country is the most fractured in Africa in terms of its cultural fabric, with serious implications for the identity of its youth. One underlining factor in these challenges is colonial in nature and one step towards addressing them is perhaps to name the factor. Naming a problem helps to make it less vague, more concrete and manageable. In naming the challenges South African youth face, one might ask whether these can be understood as the coloniality of youth? Coloniality of youth is a way of naming youth-related challenges resulting from the effect and legacies of colonialism and similar Western hegemonic influences such as apartheid on the youth population of formerly colonised regions. In the context of South Africa, coloniality of the youth enables understanding of why, for example, the country’s youth employment crisis is unique. 

Systemic inequality in education drives youth employment crisis in South Africa

South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis is fundamentally driven by deep-rooted systemic inequality embedded in the structural legacy of colonialism and apartheid, one that manifested in the 1974 decree that Afrikaans be used as a medium of instruction in black secondary schools. The decree was intended to extend the apartheid regime’s control not just over black people’s education but over their existence through cultural assimilation. Control over black people’s existence also meant placing limitations on what they can do and be as a race. It also meant control of labour. In short, central to the 1974 decree was the agenda to ill-equip and disadvantageously position black youth for opportunities in relation to work and socio-economic and political life. 

This pattern of control continues to date, though not in the form of a decree to make Afrikaans a medium of instruction in schools but in the very nature and structure of the school curriculum and pedagogical strategies that are overwhelmingly Eurocentric. That is, the education young South Africans receive today basically transmits the culture, values and worldview of Europeans, including how to survive in Europe, not in (South) Africa. It is an education that teaches the European mode of production, distribution and exchange of goods and services. This Eurocentric-African education continues to be a mechanism for reproducing black South African youth that are unfit to leverage the abundant opportunities in the country. This type of education also occasions miseducation that constrains indigenous capabilities in young South Africans in ways that amount to the coloniality of youth.     

Beyond coloniality: youth agency and the Ubuntu imperative