Youth research in South Africa

Youth research in South Africa has been very closely linked to practical work amongst youth on the ground. In the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the end of apartheid, a great deal of research took place. Virtually all of that work, however, was in support of moves to organise young people, and to develop policy positions on key issues such as education, job creation, welfare services and so on.

In the mid-1990s, after the ANC came into power, there was a considerable lull in both youth research and work amongst youth. The National Youth Development Forum, formed by youth structures across the country, collapsed amidst funding scandals, which further dampened attempts to generate interest in a sector. The launch of the National Youth Commission saw a considerable amount of policy-formulation work being done, but applied research into youth slowed almost to a standstill.

At the same time, attitudes towards youth began to lose some of the gains made. In the early 1990s, great headway was made in attacking notions of ‘lost generation’ which were created by reactionary academics and popularised by the media in the 1980s. ‘Youth’ had become synonymous with urban black male youth involved in political protest. As the research work of the early 1990s began to paint a more nuanced picture of young people, and one placed in a developmental rather than a political context, so the stereotypes began to fall away.

However, by the mid-1990s, in the absence of any concrete avenues for youth in the form of youth brigades or community service, coupled with a near-absence of applied research, old stereotypes have returned. It is again common to hear people talking or writing about the lost generation, and youth are once again being blamed for the situation they find themselves in.

That situation is indeed a worrying one. Rates of HIV infection are extremely high amongst young South Africans. Unemployment stands in excess of 60%. Teenage pregnancies force at least a fifth of young women out of school prematurely. The situation seems set to remain bleak as South Africa enters a recession.

At the same time, however, there are some very positive signs on the horizon. Firstly, on the practical front, a great deal of work is being done to organise youth brigades which will deliver basic infrastructural needs to poverty-struck areas, while rewarding youth in the form of both a stipend and educational access. These initiatives take a number of forms, including youth brigades mentioned at the Presidential Job Summit, Reconstruction Workforce camps proposed by the Department of Public Works, and a National Community Service Initiative spearheaded by the National Youth Commission. These initiatives seem set to create paid labour for hundreds of thousands of young people, and in many instances to reward that labour with access to education, psychological counselling, self-expression fora, and so on.

Once again, as organisation amongst youth increases, so research has begun to increase. On the one hand, there are a growing number of researchers undertaking masters or doctoral theses on youth-related topics. There are also an increasing number of courses in youth work being offered at tertiary institutions, many designed and taught by Australian academic David Maunders. Youth and adolescents seem set to form the core of a new school at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

On the other hand, out of universities, applied research into youth is also on the increase. The National Youth Commission has commissioned a second baseline study of youth in South Africa, and all the initiatives cited above have generated smaller or larger scale work into ways of enrolling young people into public works schemes, trying to attune those schemes to the different needs of youth, and – critically – trying to educate policy formulators and government officials of the need to treat youth on their own terms and not merely as younger and more difficult adults.

We have yet to see whether any of these initiatives bear fruit on the scale and in the manner designed. However, it is clear that we are seeing something of an about-turn: negative stereotypes are coming under pressure, organisation amongst youth is increasing, and real practical opportunities are about to be made available on a large scale. The challenges now for researchers in both applied and more theoretical planes is to ensure that they ride the crest of the wave, and then maintain interest in youth once the attention of politicians moves away to other equally needy groups in society.