Introduction

The agency of youth in the numerous narratives surrounding the South African liberation struggles as well as the postapartheid attempts to keep racism and other forms of discrimination at bay has received considerable scholarly attention. In much of those critiques, the critical approach has often been to emphasize the multiple issues of history and memory and how they relate to questions of race among the different categories of people who make up the national entity now famously styled “the rainbow nation.” This thriving debate provides an opportunity for critical reflections on how much unity can be ascribed to the rainbow nation, which, on the surface, appears beautiful and exhibits peaceful coexistence. Such bourgeoning narratives of the awesomeness of the ‘peaceful’ transition from a segregated apartheid state to a supposedly democratic and inclusive ‘new’ South Africa are often not only popularized by the state, but by the global media, which often peddles the prevalent myth of a national euphoria surrounding the supposed reconciliation of the different races in the new South Africa. What these narratives of national cohesion mask, however, are the uncomfortable compromises and concessions made by both sides of the racial divide to arrive at the much-celebrated peaceful transition. Though much of the bitterness of the past became known through the innovative Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, it was this same body that provided the public with a moral gauge with which to measure the readiness for compromise and forgiveness going forward.

While history and memory cannot be disregarded in any discussion of the trajectory of the South African nation, a look at more recent examples of deep-seated disparities, especially at social and economic levels, suggests that there needs to be a bit more nuance in order to capture the lingering uneven positionality of the numerous layers of identity in the country. South African youth readily come to mind as one major disenfranchised group we need to further understand, as their experience of apartheid and the postliberation struggles related to it is quite different from that of the older generation of South Africans. While the older generation encountered apartheid firsthand and lived through its excruciating realities, the younger generation's understanding of it has been mainly through narratives of angst and the current dispossessions steeped in the systemic structures of inequality sustained by the racially contrived system of segregation.