Not A Ticking Time Bomb, But Your Best Hope

Special Report: Activate! Leadership for Public Innovation programme

I am a ticking time bomb – unemployable, uneducated and a threat to you. I am part of the lost generation. You may as well write me off.

Just think how often you have read these words or heard them around the dinner table. Did you react negatively to them then? Or was it easier to stick a disparaging label on a voiceless, faceless youth than it is to label me? Keep calling us a ticking time bomb and it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Actually, I refuse to wear any of these labels. I’m 23 years old, bubbly, energetic and I don’t give up. I’m part of a movement that celebrates the power of young people to face up to our challenges and to change South Africa. If you think I’m nice but naive, hear my story and decide for yourself whether or not I’ve got a grip on reality.

I never knew my father. He left home before I was born and I spent most of my childhood wondering whether he was alive and, if he had stayed with us, if he would have abused me like my stepfather did. My mother was a domestic worker and when she eventually left my stepfather she supported her four children all alone. I walked for three hours every day to attend secondary school.

But by that time, I already knew that I was somebody; that I could achieve great things despite my circumstances. In my last year at primary school I had been given an opportunity to attend a private school. I often felt out of place there, so I bunked school. On several occasions my teachers actually came to my house to take me back to school. Their persistence made me see that they really did believe in me, so I started working harder.

When I was 16, I read a poem at a LoveLife concert and became part of that organisation. There I felt free at last. I chose to complete matric and to stay away from sex. I often spoke on radio. I began to see a bright future for myself.

Unfortunately, there was a group of boys who thought I was too smart for my own good. That’s what they told me as they took it turns raping me for the second time in four years. It’s not easy to forgive or forget and I feel like I have been robbed of some of my power.

But although I still live in fear of being attacked in my own community, I am not giving up. I am now a master facilitator at Activate!, training hundreds of other young people.

Our past lives may be different and we have our own specific issues and concerns. But as Activators we have a common message: that you should not give up on young people. The latest cognitive science is on our side: it shows that our brains have enormous capacity for change far beyond childhood.

In fact, from adolescence to the age of about 25 years, our minds are programmed to thrive on risk-taking and uncertainty – which underpin an entrepreneurial creative and diversifying economy. This is the time that we can become wired for innovation.

The process of “rewiring” a generation is no mean feat. It requires exposure to ideas as much as it needs skills training. Many rural young people – thought leaders in their own communities – have not travelled more than 50km from home. But expose them to big ideas and connect them to others and their worlds explode outwards. From each other, they learn to think. They can become innovators in their own communities.

For too long, we have waited for the state to solve all our problems. We won’t wait for anyone to rescue us. We want to act now, and this is how we are going to do it:

Step one is to build an upbeat identity for young people – not as victims of the past but as trendsetters of the future. That means learning to trust each other. For Activators, it means black and white sharing the same dormitory, and Young Communist League and Democratic Alliance Youth members moulding each other’s rhetoric. For a few of us, it will even mean rapist and rape survivor learning to trust one another.

New connections are vital. If we are to create a culture of innovation, we have to open up our social systems and develop connections across race and class.

Innovation is a popular buzzword, but it must also become an entrenched and sustained process across the public and private sectors. We are not naive in our understanding of what it would take to develop this culture: there is a crisis in literacy and the capacity to write: our education system is not providing the solid foundation for intellectual development and far too many receive no childhood stimulation. But we also know that our townships and rural areas are filled with innovators: homemade wheelchairs and adapted bicycles are commonplace, young people run tutoring programmes that reach thousands and mobile technologies are opening up countless opportunities.

We have hope. If history has taught us anything, it is that change is possible. This fact is true: you have to be in the game to have a chance of winning – and we are young people worth betting on.

As told to Janet Jobson. Lerato Mahoyi is part of Activate!, a diverse group of young people committed to social transformation. www.activateleadership.com

This article has been edited for Supernews with permission from Activate! The full article was originally published by the Sunday Times on the24^thof June 2012 as part of Youth Month