The journey I am presently on extends research that I began in South Africa in 1998 – almost exactly two decades ago. My initial research explored the meaning of learning for a group of young adults, then mostly in their 20s. Too young to have actively participated in the student resistance movement that catapulted the anti-apartheid struggle into international headlines in 1976, their educations and identities were nonetheless significantly shaped by the resistance ideology and violence of the 1980s. As unemployed young adults in the newly democratic South Africa, in 1998-99 they joined a six-month program at the Joint Enrichment Project (JEP), a non-government organization (NGO) emphasizing job-readiness and “life skills.”
My initial research showed how the identities and discourse of the young people were shaped by the shifting identity and discourse of NGO itself, as it moved from an anti-apartheid focus to its paradoxical new role as a development-provider aligned with government, promoting its products and services in a free-market economy. During that time, these young adults also moved from feeling in between to feeling in transition: they gained a sense of actively moving toward their futures by repositioning themselves in the evolving discourse practices at the JEP. Partly as a result of participating in this youth-development NGO, in 1998-99 these young, unemployed black South Africans were not just living in a country that was transitioning around them; they had come to feel in transition themselves.
They are now in their 40s, and most of them have children of their own. Three key questions motivate my current research as I spend time with them and their children today: 1) What has become of their sense of being “in transition”? 2) What changes have occurred for them, and for their children, socially, economically, and in their sense of identity as South Africans? 3) How are public discourses—from church to social media currently shaping their sense of identity as South Africans?
Since 1994 when it held its first democratic elections, South Africa’s accomplishments have been significant. In addition to universal voting rights and political freedom, South Africans have seen increased access to utilities, desegregated schools, several million houses provided through the Reconstruction and Development Program, and increased payments for child support, disability, and pensions.
But there is another side to this story: While a minority black upper class has swelled, there is more economic distance than ever between them and the poor black majority. Despite increased social welfare spending and the rise of a wealthy black upper class, racialized poverty and high unemployment—the overall official rate hovers just above 25%, with the rate for those under age 35 above 50%—still plague the country. The formal economy is growing too slowly to meaningfully address the unemployment issue, and internal politics and regulations have hindered foreign investment.
And there is a dark cloud hovering over this precarious situation: in early 2018, Jacob Zuma, embroiled in years of corruption since elected South Africa’s fourth president in 2009, was forced to resign. Criminal charges against him are now piling up in the courts, including an incomprehensibly tangled web of “state capture” by the Gupta family’s business ties to India. Zuma has been temporarily replaced as South African president by the new ANC head Cyril Ramaphosa, who has been cleaning house in government and parastatal enterprises, and promises to run in the 2019 national elections on a platform of anti-corruption and party unity.
South Africa now finds itself on the cusp of another significant transition; 25 years after the end of apartheid, the 2019 elections promise to be another defining moment in the country’s history. Public and private discourses express a sense of having moved beyond a post-apartheid era, to a post-Zuma one. There is a palpable sense of a weary country wanting to start over, once again.
Over the past month, I’ve spent time with some of those same Sowetans who were in their 20s two decades ago. They've invited me into their homes to spend time with their families. We’ve met in their neighborhoods, at their children’s schools, their churches, malls, workplaces. To a person, they are the same gracious, generous, thoughtful, funny, persistent, hopeful people that I knew twenty years ago. And yet they find themselves living lives that are, in many cases, not as they imagined in 1998. Twenty years later, there are some notable changes in their lives, but also some significant continuities. Coming soon: introductions to these South Africans who came of age in the years immediately following South Africa’s democratic elections.
Photos: Lovely with her daughter, David with his daughter