Youth activists from Khayelitsha, Cape Town, reflections on their experiences of activism for social justice

ABSTRACT

This article will discuss reflections by six youth activists in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, who were interviewed for an international collaborative research project which explored civic forms of youth-led activism which could lead to social change. The aim was to investigate different forms of civic engagement and youth activism in situations where the youth had been traumatised due to past or ongoing structural violence. This article reflects on the findings of the study and makes connections between activism, learning and knowledge production. The research methodology was initiated as a participatory action research project and six activists were interviewed by youth researchers from the NGO Equal Education. Critical findings were that the activists felt that the youth were the entry point to building powerful communities and improving the quality of life in the townships. Personal experiences shaped their choice of activism and social justice projects; this study demonstrates as Choudry (2014) argues that young people gain critical awareness through their own education and cultural practices and in this process new knowledge is produced.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth-led activism
• civic engagement
• transformative learning
• consciousness raising

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the youth researchers as co-participants in the research, conducting the interviews and writing the narratives of the activists for the 2019 publication which is reproduced with additional information in this article. Also, to acknowledge Dr Yvette Daniel from the University of Windsor for initiating the project and providing funding for the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We would like to move away from racial classification, but the present realities and inequities still have to be explained in racial terms. These terms are problematic and open to abuse and misinterpretation. In this article the term race and black African and coloured are used without intending any negative inference. In this article black is used to include all those disenfranchised during Apartheid. Race is a socially constructed terms with no scientific basis. However, during the 1970s and following on from the American civil rights movements a more positive meaning was given to the term black – as in the Black Consciousness Movements and more recently in the Black Lives Matter social movement as well as in the decolonial literatures.