Many people look at the youth of S.A as the rot in a red, big, juicy apple. I look at it at the same angle ironically; I think that the youth of S.A is so used to getting things for free, that they have even forgotten what it’s like to fight for what you want. We look at the apartheid era as an era of physical oppression only, but we forget that what the freedom fighters were fighting for is the chance to choose what we want as people, and who we want to become as well, making us see that they were fighting against mental oppression as well.

Now that we’ve gotten the opportunity to say,”no, we don’t want this” and “yes, we want that”, we have gotten seriously and, at the lack of a better word, stupidly picky. We’ve decided that we’d rather sit and not do anything than to do manual labor, getting down and dirty, because the people around us won’t find that ‘sexy’. We have disregarded the notion that to get to the top, you have to start at the bottom.

But what I love about being a youth in this era is that we are a bunch of dark horses. We are capable of rising from the dust and taking over, just like a phoenix. In the bunch that don’t want to do anything, there you will find us, the bunch that lives and breathes ambition. We are dreaming and working towards a better South Africa for ourselves and hopefully our kids. We are the descendents of the 1976 youth of South Africa, the strong, ambitious, courageous, pioneering youth, and that is what I LOVE about being a youth in S.A in this era!

By: Moshibudi Madia (Written: 16 June 2013)

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