SA needs to re-member its dis-membered youth to the centre of national life

When the apartheid regime crafted the Bantu Education Act of 1953, its architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, was not merely engaging in curriculum experimentation. He was creating a purposeful boundary, a carefully legislated limit on what an African child could become, think or aspire to.

The logic was explicit: there is no place for the native in European industrial society, so why prepare him for it? What followed was not educational neglect of an accidental or careless kind, but dis-membering as state policy, the systematic removal of black people from the body politic of their own country, beginning with the erasure of their capacity to imagine themselves as full participants in it.

When the youth of Soweto marched on 16 June 1976, they were not marching against a linguistic inconvenience, but against the entire body politic designed for economic and epistemic erasure.

That history imposes itself on the present with a weight that too many public intellectuals and politicians prefer to set aside. Yet it is precisely that weight that must be acknowledged if we are to understand why the nomenclature of youth development in post-apartheid South Africa remains so consequential.

To call young people a “lost generation” or a “ticking time bomb” is not merely imprecise; it is to participate, however unwittingly, in the same knowledge structure that Verwoerd used to justify Bantu Education, a structure that locates the problem in the young person rather than in the conditions that produced their exclusion and that relieves the state, capital and the institutional apparatus of accountability for the political economy of youth marginalisation. It is dis-membering by another name, wearing the clothes of concern.

Intellectual honesty and collective accountability

As I have argued elsewhere, what South Africa needs is an epistemic turn: a shift away from this knowledge structure and towards one that restores the ontological density of young people, their being, their belonging, their right to be named and defined on their own terms.

The neo-conservative matrices of power that disenfranchise, distort, dismiss, dismantle and disrespect young people, what I have called the ritual of “dissing”, exonerate capitalism for the crises of poverty, racism and inequality it produces, redirect blame towards those disfavoured by prevailing economic arrangements and generate ideas about young people that shape the posture and ambition of the national response. The epistemic turn is therefore not merely a call for kinder language but a demand for intellectual honesty and collective accountability.

Re-membering is the counter-logic, the deliberate act of restoring young people to the centre of national life, not as future citizens awaiting activation but as present builders of society, with agency and with the full respect of human beings who have desires, dreams and the capacity to lead. Re-membering requires a social and economic infrastructure of care, adequately funded and sustained over time, that meets young people where they are and opens the doors that structural neglect has kept closed.

Closing doors to opportunity, I submit, is the highest form of dis-membering and democratic indifference, the continuation, by omission, of what Verwoerd began by commission.

When local government fails to deliver quality services, when the Sector Education and Training Authorities underperform and squander resources meant for skills development, when the National Student Financial Aid Scheme is led by lumpens who surrender it to cartels that profit from the hunger and desperation of students, when the criminal justice system fails young people who are both its most frequent victims and its most frequent targets, these are not merely administrative shortcomings deserving polite rebuke.

They are acts of dis-membering, and those responsible deserve all manner of condemnation, for their conduct is Verwoerdian in its consequences, however different their stated intentions from their oppressive ancestor. I say this loudly, even if it hurts my own colleagues and comrades: when you make decisions that take away opportunity from the youth, you are acting Verwoerdian and deserve the same end.

Two organisations, working with young people of very different circumstances but animated by the same foundational commitment to re-membering, offer Youth Day 2026 its most instructive lesson in what this counter-logic looks like in practice.

Not rescue but restoration

Chrysalis Academy was established in 2000 as a civic initiative supported by the Western Cape government, situated at the foot of the Table Mountain range with all its historical hauntings and layered legacies of dispossession and deferred democratic dreams.

It runs a three-month residential programme for young people aged 18 to 25 drawn from across the Western Cape, many of whom arrive carrying the weight of substance abuse, gang exposure, domestic violence and interrupted schooling, growing up in communities where the state’s most consistent presence has been punitive rather than protective.

What Chrysalis offers is not rescue but restoration: an infrastructure of care in which the body, mind and spirit are reawakened through structured routines, nature-based healing, tension- and trauma-releasing exercises, gender healing and a co-mentoring philosophy in which those once dis-membered become architects of re-membering for those who follow.

More than 10,000 young people have completed the programme since its founding, and each graduation is a living act of re-membering, proof that given the right conditions, the so-called lost generation finds its way home. Its long-time leader, Lucille Meyer, was fully aware of the re-membering effects of this programme and relentlessly engaged the private sector and politicians from different political parties to eradicate the legacy of Verwoerd. Her graduates learnt to imagine themselves beyond the caricature of the Cape youth as prone to conflict with the law.

Recognising talent

Elsewhere, there is the Entsika Foundation, run by accountant-turned-social entrepreneur Zakhele Mkhize. Entsika operates on the same fundamental logic but through a different entry point.

Where Chrysalis works with young people navigating the consequences of structural violence and special inequality, Entsika works with those who have demonstrated exceptional intellectual ability in the face of material deprivation, whose potential would otherwise be absorbed quietly into the vast reserve of unrealised South African talent that Bantu Education suppressed and that post-apartheid underfunding continues to contain.

Since 2018, Entsika has provided full bursaries, mentorship and sustained support to high-performing matriculants from rural areas and townships, grounded in the recognition that talent is evenly distributed across our society, even if opportunity, for reasons that are neither accidental nor natural, is not.

Like Chrysalis, they tell poor rural youth that their past should not define them but refine them. This is a re-membering statement that is lacking in the private sector and in the government’s daily parlance.

The 2026 cohort deserves to be named because its members are not abstractions and their achievements are not coincidental.

Buyani grew up in Mtubatuba in northern KwaZulu-Natal, where there were very few doctors in his family or community, and graduated with an MBChB from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, earning dean’s commendations from his first through his fifth years.

Minenhle, from the Msinga area, graduated as a medical doctor, guided by Charlotte Maxeke’s injunction: “If you can rise, bring someone with you.” Musawenkonsi, from Nqutu, graduated with first class honours in mechatronics engineering from the University of Cape Town, consistently on the Dean’s Merit List, having navigated the long distance from a resource-constrained rural school to one of the country’s most demanding academic environments.

Somila, from Cofimvaba in the Eastern Cape, completed an actuarial science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand and, during his undergraduate years, founded EduAble, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to closing the information gap that prevents rural matric pupils from accessing higher education.

Nokukhanya, from the Nkumbeni area of KwaZulu-Natal, is now a qualified doctor who writes with a simplicity that carries the full weight of the argument: no matter where you come from, your background does not determine your future.

These young people are not exceptional outliers produced by luck or individual heroism, but the predictable and replicable outcome of adequate and sustained investment in young people who had the ability and the will but lacked the conducive conditions that make both sufficient.

The exceptionalism lies not in the graduates but in the rarity of the investment, and that rarity is the true indictment of a society too comfortable with the distance between its constitutional commitments and its institutional delivery. Our narcissistic elites would rather invest in BBLs than extend opportunities to the young people on the Cape Flats and in Nquthu.

On Youth Day 2026, 50 years after Soweto, the appropriate response to the work of Chrysalis and Entsika is not applause but the harder and more urgent thing: a commitment, at every level of governance, philanthropy and public policy, to scale what they have demonstrated and to mainstream the logic of re-membering across our entire approach to young people.

Every young person in this country deserves a chance at a productive life, and denying that chance, whether through underfunded schools, absent bursaries, captured institutions or a political discourse that names young people as a problem rather than a possibility, is the continuation of dis-membering, democratic indifference in practice and a dishonour to every young person who marched in 1976 so that the doors of learning and culture might, at last, be open to all.

Opening doors is the highest form of re-membering youth into the mainstream, a calling that all in society can join, as Meyer and Mkhize have done. DM