Yesterday evening I had the enormous honour of delivering a speech at the Youth Day celebration hosted by the South African ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, at his beautiful residence in DC. The party was wonderful, the food and wine were South African and the people were utterly fascinating. The theme of the speeches was youth uniting for economic freedom.

Good evening to the South African ambassador, Mr Ebrahim Rasool and Mrs Rasool, SAWIP team and guests. Thank you for the honour of addressing you this evening.

I am the daughter of a Jewish mother. Most of you will know that few beings are more overprotective, interfering and coddling than the Jewish mother. While carnivores are categorised as meat-eaters or herbivores as plant-eaters, Jewish mothers are categorised as clingers and naggers – the defining feature of this species being their inability to let their child out of their tight ring of overbearing control. So you will understand my complete shock when one day, my Jewish mother turned to me and yelled “just leave! Move out, get a job, pay your own bills, run your own life; just do it while you still know everything”. I was entirely taken aback. For a Jewish mother to reach a point at which she was prepared to defy her biological urge to cling to her offspring and to dismiss her daughter on the basis that she “knows everything” means that she must have entered a place of unparalleled despair at the teenage indolence of the youth she had produced.

My mother’s Jewish-mother-genetic-code ignited soon after the incident and she quickly decided that while I was still an adolescent brat, I was her teenager and therefore she was not letting me go. However, her outburst signalled to me what is a far greater problem in the politics and discourse of youth development. There is a common perception that the youth think they know everything but in reality know nothing because of relative life inexperience. This is a problematic observation.

There are a number of ways that the youth are understood, generally. One of the most common perceptions, in my experience, is that of youth being a nuisance – a group that sees everything as entitled to them. The youth are often believed to be dangerous, lazy or simply arrogant ‘know-it-alls’. To some, youth is a phase – an intolerable phase. The ideas of people in this phase of life are discounted, because of their lack of experience, or lack of knowledge, or lack of discipline.

On a large scale, this translates to the dismissal and disenfranchisement of the youth. The current situation of youth in South Africa involves approximately 4 million young people not in any form of employment, education or training. What does this mean for South Africa’s future? Is it the rebellious radicalisation of youth or the total withdrawal and apathy of youth?

On the opposite side of the spectrum, youth can be seen as positive agents of change and as the site of novel ideas and enigmatic solutions. June 16^th 1976 is seen as the youth positively assuming responsibility for their lives. These young people were empowered with the realisation of their own agency. The event we are celebrating tonight is illustrative of the fact that the youth are powerful; our ideas matter.

The landscape of the South African resistance movement against apartheid was fundamentally altered by the watershed that was witnessed on June 16^th. The youth of Soweto injected new hope into resistance that ended the period of the ‘Silent Sixties’. Youth leaders and student movements rose to the forefront of the United Democratic Front and anti-apartheid resistance movements in the 1980s. Young people – whose ideas were inspired by Black Consciousness and anger motivated by the catalyst of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction – successfully initiated change in South Africa. This is not dissimilar to the United States in the 1960s or the recent Arab Spring.

The parents of these individuals probably decided that these young people thought they “knew everything” too; others saw them as naïve and unrealistic. However, it is clear that the youth “knowing everything” allows the youth to be a powerful force filled with inspiration and energy for change. The current South African landscape is such that the youth need not be dismissed. We need to empower the youth, by stimulating their ideas, inspiring them to think, to solve and to act. We then, quite vitally, need to listen and be prepared to change.

People frequently tell me that today’s youth are different to those of 1976 because they are entitled or too self-important to accept instruction. I may sound like an arrogant adolescent who thinks she knows everything in saying this, but I suspect that adults have been dismissing the generations below them for centuries.

I am involved in a community development project run from the University of Cape Town that uses debating as a means to teach critical thinking, argumentation and confidence as skills to high school learners in townships of Cape Town. The organisation began as an initiative of the youth and aims to develop skills and knowledge for the youth. The high school learners I have encounter in these classrooms have defied every negative view I have been confronted with about the current youth of South Africa.

To me, the success of the project illustrates that if young people are provided with the resources and a space to be empowered with knowledge, they will take it and benefit from it. When youth are given the encouragement and skills to create change, they are capable of doing it.

Hindrances to economic freedom in South Africa are deeply entrenched in our history of segregation, inadequate education and inequality. This is not something that is easy to change. The only conceivable way I can see of these happening is the youth innovating ways to pave their own way to economic freedom. This requires education and empowerment. This requires a collaborative effort between government, business and active citizens. Programs like SAWIP do an invaluable job in achieving this.

I am not here tonight to inspire a youth revolution. Tonight I would like you all to contemplate the magnitude of what economic freedom means in South Africa. We need to stimulate the youth, inspire them to think, solve and act; then we need to listen and be prepared to change. If the youth unite constructively and with the adequate skills and forums in which to achieve economic freedom, it is possible. Considering that every young person knows everything, this knowledge should be harnessed and not dismissed. I would like to leave you with a quote from Maya Angelou:

“When you know better, you do better”.