REMEMBERING THE LEMBEDE GENERATION AS WE TRAVERSE THE NATIONAL YOUTH MONTH

As the month of June rages with its cold fronts, demanding of humanity in our country to rush for warmer clothes, creating opportunities to congregate around fires in search of heat, and confirming that it is a season of intimacy and intimate conversations, the question is what is the conversation about. Faced with, a possibility of becoming a failed state, a miracle recoverer against the odds it is facing, a national youth strife in demand for leadership decisiveness on their future, a world that is forgetting the 1994 miracle settlement, and an economy whose success depends on its inherent inequalities to survive, South Africans have an interesting around the fire agenda for its conversation.

In contexts where the country is not in anyway an abstraction of a dystopian state, there are conversations that see roses and green. These conversations might be based on a belief that the country needs efficiencies to sustain its templates of economic management. Some might be genuinely out of no knowledge of what would be required to dislodge such a vibrant economy from its rival character defining inequalities decorating its success.

Humans of African origin (HAOs)that have found themselves defined into a geographic construct called South Africa, have formalised their struggle system against political and economic exclusion in 1912. This was after two years another process of organising the templates of exclusion into state institutions undergirded by a legal system had just been formalised into a non-blacks only constitutional construct. HAOs established a South African Native National Congress, that was later redefined into an African National Congress

This Congress was a collection of HAOs who were in their own right nodes of influence from areas and localities they came from. Their social status could be in one way or another be prefixed if not 'praise sang', including being related with the faith based complexes. It took then youth imagination in the ilk of Pixley Ka Seme and Sol Plaatjie to chronicle this Congress as an institution of leadership. The Congress was created to accept members in as much as it could ask them, through a process, to leave. It became an institution into which HAO aspirations of could be marshalled into formal policy changing demands. 

Congress youth became catalysts for such imaginations. As the Congress was maturing into being a formalised voice for HAOs, it sought to propose alternatives to what it was increasingly becoming radicalised against, as opposed to the initial requests to be included. The systematic land dispossession antics of the grand colonial empire before it handed over to apartheid colonialists who accelerated the marginalisation from the economy, called for written responses. 

Under Pixley Ka Seme's leadership, older this time, Congress leadership developed Imvo za Bantu, otherwise anglicised into African Claims. In charge of the machinery to suck-into a document Imvo za Bantu was the youthful Calata who was the Congress Secretary. Imvo za Bantu remains one of Congress's profoundly Pan-Africanist documents. The process that supposedly produced it was to be a trailer for the democratic character the Congress ultimately adopted as the struggle system adapted to successive non-black oppressive regimes. 

One of the dividends of the Imvo za Bantu process, as well as the growth of university and teacher training college system, was the establishment of the Congress Youth League. It is this youths that redefined the history of the struggle against political and economic marginalisation. In their wisdom, this youth cohort, otherwise referred to as the Lembede generation, they developed a template with which a new form of struggle would be conducted. They made a prophetic call for political freedom in their lifetime. 

At a time they organised themselves, their intellectual prowess, evidenced by their qualifications as individuals, their professions, vocations they were involved in, as well as the literature they were exposed became a resource that defined them as non-racial beings given race defined class position they were dumped into. One of their seminal contributions in the redefinition of Congress was the creed they adopted as part of a Africanist Program of Action which attracted the attention of the State security apparatus. The posterity nature of the creed has in fact, and arguably still is, instructing to ANCness and via their influence to establish South Africa as we know it, it also instructs our being as a South African Nation. The creed states;

1. We believe in the divine destiny of nations
2. The goal of all our struggles is Africanism and our motto is 'Africa's cause must triumph'
3. We believe that the national liberation of Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves. We reject foreign leadership of Africa 
4. We may borrow (the content of) ideologies from foreign ideologies, but we reject wholesale importation of foreign ideologies into Africa 
5. We believe that leadership must be the personification and symbol of popular aspirations and ideals
6. We believe that practical leadership must be given to capable men, whatever their status in society
7. We believe in the scientific approach to all African problems 
8. We combat moral disintegration among Africans by maintaining and upholding high ethical standards ourselves 
9. We believe in the unity of all Africans from the Mediterranean Sea in the North to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans in the South- and that Africans must speak with one voice 

As we celebrate youth month, I wish South Africa, especially the current ANC leadership, our President, Captains of Industry, Alliance leadership, Youth Leaders can pause, read and try to find space for what they are doing on a daily basis inside this path finding creed. It is a creed that was written by Congress Youth leaders that became PAC, BCM, Bantustan Leadership, Black Local Authority Councillors, NAFCOC Leadership, and later Rivonia Trialists, Mission in Exile, Robben Island Prisoners. Some of them became Presidents in SADC, Members of Parliament in Malawi, Kenya and beyond. Before we look at the later contributions of youth that are now the factions characterising our politics in their adult life, let us pause and ask the famous Desmond Tutu question to Winnie Mandela and others, at the TRC, 'What happened?'

It should equally be noted that as the Congress Leaguers were organising themselves into a formalised structure in the early 40s, there was a parallel nationalist process that was galvanising Afrikaner youth towards their 1948 'breakthrough' which culminated into the 1961 Republican Constitution. In this Cohort there were the PW Botha's, BJ Vosters, Pik Botha's, FW De Klerks, Anton Ruperts, Nicky Oppenheimers and many other persons that institutionalised this our unequal society whose economy seems to grow only when it entrenches inequality as we saw in the Mbeki 'boom years'. 

If there are broad principles that could make us think about a reset button for this economy, Congress League creed might be a starting point. Included in this bouquet of principles should be decisions of the Boerderbond after the National Party was announced a winner in 1948. The question still is, 'What happened that cannot happen? or What should happen?

Be ngisho nje🤷🏽‍♂️

Be ngibuza nje🤷🏽‍♂️