Youth: Apathy, Whiteness and Juju

In the news feeding frenzy on the latest Julius Malema scandal, the collective imagination of our media yet again fails to address the real issues lurking behind his shadow. Firstly, I am frankly unmoved by the figure of Juju, who seems more have built his public personality on the collective “swart gevaar” fantasies of white bourgeois South Africans. Secondly, there is not all that much evidence of his supposed popularity among poor black youth that the media constantly refer to. Even the recent riots at Luthuli House attracted less than 1,000 people (many of whom are rumoured to have been paid). I would also hazard a guess that many who attend Julius’s rallies either attend because they are offered food or t-shirts or just want to see him say crazy shit. Too often, the liberal media bases much of its coverage on the assumption that an angry black demagogue naturally has thousands of mindless poor black youth following his every word. If I have to read another article decrying the nebulous influences of Juju’s populism and the investor panic emanating from the irrational black youth, I might have to join that great vortex of racism, reaction and stupidity known as the online comment section. The issue which is largely off the agenda of the punditry is that there is a whole generation growing up in South Africa facing little or no prospect of securing a decent job in their lifetime. Nobody really wants to talk about it. Helen Zille’s botox-fueled and (failed) toyi-toying attempts to engage young South Africans are beyond farcical. The fact is that the DA has no clue how to talk to young black South Africans beyond their fetishization of the neo-liberal entrepreneurial spirit lurking behind questionable “100% service delivery” claims and attempts to spread the protestant work ethic around. The truth is that only one major politician in the country is attempting to engage with this particular demographic, and this politician is widely known as ‘Juju’.

This brings me to my final point. Recently, we have seen a debate around the concept of “whiteness” emerge amongst our chattering classes in response to a fairly innocuous paper by Dr. Sam Vice of the Rhodes philosophy department. This paper, due to its discovery by Steve Hofmeyr and his acolytes, led to an orgiastic outbreak of white hysteria. What is evident to me, as much as I disagree with much of Vice’s argument, is that a political ontology of whiteness exists. This is reflected in the explicit attitudes of too many Rhodes Students. This attitude can be characterized in the endless moans of reverse racism, an attitude of self-entitlement and a widespread belief that merely passing is cause for celebration. Tertiary education has become a 3-year excuse to fuck, do drugs and party with little or no consequences, not that these are bad things in themselves, but university is also an opportunity for real political engagement and political reflection without the burdens of adulthood. While youth from Greece to Cairo rise up and exemplify the power of popular politics, being white in South Africa results in yet another night at Friars. Fuck that. I hope my generation can learn from the mistakes of our parents and start building a serious and exciting new left in this country.