TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 31

Towards national unity and reconciliation: giving priority to the needs of children and youth

114 Ms Anne Mckay, from the KwaZulu-Natal Survivors of Violence Project, made the following statement at the children/youth special hearing in Durban:

I think the stress on family life created by the constant pressure of the violence in this province cannot be underestimated. We’ve heard mothers in Bhambayi saying that they are literally too tired to take care of their children, even now in 1997, because their minds are full of the violence and they have no hope for the future. So they are not able to give that emotional nurturing and support to their children years after the violence has finished, because they have never received support; they have never received any place where they can feel safe enough to deal with their emotions so that they are emotionally available for their children…

[As] the adults that are in a sense the representatives of our society, we need to acknowledge to young people what has happened to them. We actually need to admit to ourselves that we have millions of children who either have left school, or are reaching the end of schooling, and there are no jobs for them to go to. We have to acknowledge that. We cannot wait for the RDP [Reconstruction and Development Programme] and the Macro Economic Plan to come up with economic growth. They are unemployed at the moment. They are at a loose end and not knowing where to go with their futures at the moment. I think the previous speakers spelt it out clearly. They wanted training. They wanted skills training. They want youth programmes. They want the Youth Commission to do something about their problems. They want youth centres, where recreational and intellectual development opportunities are available in their townships, because they don’t have money to travel to town and visit the museums, and so on and so forth, here.

Many of them left school at a very early age, and intelligent, interested, intellectually stimulated youth are walking around with standard five or standard seven education, with no one to recognise their potential. Other countries have increased the schooling available so that ex-combatants can go back to school and be educated with people of their own age, not sitting twentyfive-year-olds in the same classroom as fifteen-year-olds. They want proper adult education programmes whereby they can complete their schooling and go forward to fulfil their intellectual development.

I think that the demands are very simple and very practical, but much of the psychological relief would come from having these problems acknowledged, and having them on the debate and on the agenda.

115 The vital role of faith communities in the field of education – helping to nurture a democratic culture and becoming more directly involved in formal teaching – was emphasised at the faith community hearing in East London:

Mr Tom Manthata: Bishop, I’m not asking any new question. This has been raised by Brigalia when she was addressing the issue of poverty … That is the issue of education and the moral decay. My simple question is: does the Anglican Church consider reviving or establishing schools at community level? Because that is where this country will begin to address the issue of moral decay. It is at that level that we can begin to address even issues of crime. Does the church begin to say we can revive church schools at community level?

Bishop Michael Nuttall: Chairperson, I think that what Mr Tom Manthata has raised is of enormous importance. I am not sure what the pattern is throughout the life of our church, but certainly, I think there is a desire to move in this direction. We have recently, in the diocese that I come from, seen the establishment of half a dozen schools at local community level, initiated by parishes as a result of a synod resolution asking for exactly that to take place. Together with the foundation of two new bigger ventures than local community ventures, schools more like the ones that you have just mentioned. So we are following up on that tradition and the whole idea is to try and fill that vacuum that has existed ever since the Bantu Education Act came into being and we lost our schools for one reason or another as a result of that legislation and a sense of the need for the church to re-engage in a whole new creative way in the whole education process. And certainly, that will be one of the areas in which we will try to exercise our influence in regard to the spiritual and moral life of the nation.

May I just add in that regard that for me in regard to moral reconstruction, one of the most crucial things as I see it is for people to be helped, young and older people alike, particularly the young, to be helped in this new dispensation of freedom in which we find ourselves to make responsible choices. There are some who seem to want to return to earlier tyrannies and censorship of the past. I say no. We need to accept the reality of the new atmosphere of freedom under which we now operate. But it lays upon us an even heavier responsibility to assist one another, and particularly the young, in the making of responsible choices and earning and living by those choices.

And so there is a new set of r’s. We talked about the three r’s of reading, writing and arithmetic. The three r’s of rights, responsibilities and relationships. Rights with responsibilities exercised in the context of affirming relationships.

That is where the making of responsible choices really begins to come in and have some impact. And certainly as part of that process we need to be engaging as much as we can with the schooling process.