TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 32

116 At the special hearing on children and youth in Johannesburg, Mr George Ndlozi gave testimony on the activities of young people involved in self-defence units (SDUs) on the East Rand during the early 1990s. He insisted that “far from being a bunch of undisciplined comrades or the lost generation, SDUs were in many ways the backbone of defence in Katorus. If it were not for them, many of us would not be sitting here today.” His submission and those of many of the other young people who testified at the hearing made it clear “that youth involved in SDU activities have suffered a loss that can never be replaced, their childhood”.

117 He also sketched the extremely difficult conditions they faced and the challenges presented by their reintegration into society :

[At] that stage there was a lot of confusion. You didn’t know what to do, you prayed and you thought your prayers – God is not there, prayers are not answered. You do everything, you cry, you do whatever, and there is no answer to the solution.

And at the end of the day when you heard someone has died, and you just smile or laugh and say oh, our comrade is gone.

And if one can understand that confusion, then one would be able to understand that the Commanders and other political leaders were in another state in which they sort of failed enough to concentrate on how to convince younger people from not getting involved.

And there was a situation where you had to choose in which way do you go. It is either you come on this side or you become on the other side, because you cannot be neutral in that area. It was not possible for you to be neutral. If the attacks were launched, you are also affected and your family would be killed.

So what I will say is yes, things went wrong and we will actually like to ask the Commission to make sure if it had powers, that in future younger people are not getting exposed to this kinds of things because at the end of the day they get a disease that is called post stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, which if you look back to some of them, they went back to school, but they can’t cope any more. They can’t cope and they come back and they just leave school. There are a lot of them in the township.

Some of them have made requests to the [Commission] that the [Commission] organise vocational training for them and some of them can’t go back to schools, because when they left school they were about thirteen years and some of them left school when they were in standard six, and now they are today about twenty-one, some of them.

Some of the SDU and SPU [self-protection unit] members were incorporated into the police service. One never believed that these two groups will work, you know, without problems with each other. But through the series of discussions that took place amongst them, today the crime around that area is decreased looking at the police statistics. Although not all of them were incorporated, there were some projects that also came [into existence] and there are some security companies which trained other people around there to have certificates so that they could get jobs.

And there are a lot of youth groupings trying to formulate themselves into some kind of a club. For instance I can mention Ithembalethu, which is existing in Katlehong, trying to bring all the youth who were affected by the violence, together and think about things that they might do to try and develop the community, to try and restore a dignity of the youth, to try and sort of, restore culture of living because the most problematic thing is going to school.

Although we might say there are some of the people today who have decided to become criminals, but there are a very few. You can name them, there are about four, five. And the question of the community discussing issues, I think they can find a remedy to that situation.

118 And at the youth hearing in Cape Town on 22 May 1997, Mr Riefaat Hattas, a political activist since the age of fifteen, placed this challenge before the Commission and the youth of today:

These are only the comrades that … worked close with me. There are thousands of other comrades; I call them the forgotten comrades. Nobody took notice of us; nobody took notice of them. I would like the [Commission] to remember those people and I hope one day all the street children that must still attend school and those people who are sitting here who is coming from high schools, you have a responsibility towards us to try to reach your full potential and you must make the most of your normal lives that you have, because we are not able to do it. We have been messed up... Please, I beg of you, to make the best of your lives. You owe it to us.