Wandile roars through the streets of downtown Joburg on his skateboard. He flips it over and somehow it lands right side up underneath his feet and he continues roaring down the street. This is a skill and an achievement that utterly eludes someone of my age and generation.
The last time I was on a skateboard was, well, a long time ago. I was a schoolboy living in a whites-only suburb and it was a clunky heavy thing that I promptly fell off and scraped my shoulder badly. It was only the ministration by my friend’s teenage sister of copious amounts of mercurochrome that made the experience memorable.
The years go by so fast and we are now witnessing a completely new generation of young people taking over the first stages of leadership of our society. Wandile is actually in his late 20s and not only is he a skateboard champ; he is manufacturing his own skateboards and working at a headphone manufacturing company.
Then there is Mpho, who runs a small coffee shop in downtown Joburg, working alongside property developer Russell, or Andale who has the funkiest fashion shop just near the Rand Club. There is design consultant Sphiwe, who makes his own T-shirt brand, or Mbuso “Moose”, who runs a concept store in Dube with some of the most original fashion designs I have seen in a long time.
The list of these energetic, entrepreneurial young folk that I have been meeting recently goes on and on. To some degree it is a Joburg phenomenon – this city offers the freedom for self-expression and the opportunity to make a go of things like no other place on this continent – but this generation is by no means confined to Joburg, they are springing up all over the country.
Many, although not all, are the black middle-class, beneficiaries of the political changes that started taking place for their parents in 1990. But many of them are white, coloured or Indian, too, and race, for all of them, is simply not an issue in the way that has bedevilled this country for centuries. They all have friends of other races and interact constantly and regularly on both a social and a business level that was both inconceivable and, of course, often illegal, for people of older generations.
In a way, perhaps, this should be expected – certainly many sociological studies have revealed that when people of different races reach some sort of parity in income and deal with each other, especially from childhood, on a relatively equal basis then racist prejudices tend to fall away very rapidly.
We also cannot forget the number of people living in stark poverty – the vast majority of them black – who simply have to spend all their energy and hope merely trying to survive.
Nonetheless, as the recent local government elections have partially revealed, the face of leadership in this country is shifting slowly, but fundamentally. This change is challenging what has become the post-apartheid status quo where mostly black liberation leadership derives its strength and political capital from overcoming the cruelty and the inequities of the past.
The ANC is profoundly threatened by this shift and the DA is perhaps overly optimistic. No one can deny the non-racial leadership of the ANC taking us out of the hideousness of apartheid. Since 1994, the ANC has achieved much and it is not going away any time soon.
A deep structural economic problem in this country is that the vast majority of black people have no access to resources or to even the most basic of middle-class lifestyles without connections to the ANC or, at least, some sort of government or political position.
This poses a serious political threat in that every time an opposition party makes inroads into the ANC’s power base, many people who make up the majority of the population stand to lose their livelihood.
This is a deep conundrum for our democracy – the thought of the ANC losing power is literally just too terrifying for many poor people to imagine. It would rock their world in a way that is unimaginable to middle-class people who do not rely on political connections to survive economically.
Nonetheless, this change is beginning to happen. Struggle memories are fading, present realities intrude and the ANC is steadily losing its moral, social and political hold on the leadership of this country. No one knows exactly what this emerging young generation really thinks about politics; certainly they are not all willy-nilly voting for the DA, but they are not beholden to the past and to the ANC for liberating them from it.
They are living their lives in completely new ways that challenge the old mindsets that we of the older generation are often locked into. When I speak to these young people of all races, I am reminded of Van Zyl Slabbert saying that South Africa is too big to grab by the throat. I don’t think this new generation will let the ANC, or anyone else for that matter, dictate to them.
For those of us who came of age during apartheid and have lived through the Struggle to see its end, this generation is no longer the young rainbow children for whom we hope for a better future. They are now our emerging leaders for us to look up to. It is hard sometimes to see that they are 20 years younger than we are, but we need to listen to them. We remember the past; they understand the future.
l Hamilton Wende is a Joburg-based commentator.