Vision, Voices and Hope

Listening

On Tuesday I went to an event called: "Voices, Visions and Hopes of our Youth. What's missing in our new democracy."

It's a UCT Humanities Faculty initiative, where public figures have conversations with South African youth. This was the first one, and the conversers were five high school pupils and three adult panelists.
The panelists were Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Dr Alex Boraine and Finance Minister Mr Trevor Manuel (from left to right in the photo above). Some illustrious panelists!
I won't put the names of the scholars, because they are not public figures so perhaps they would not like to have their names in the public domain on my blog, but they ranged from Grade 10 to Grade 12 and came from Alexander Sinton High School, Tafelsig High School, Rustenburg High School, Durban Girls College and Uxolo High School.

It really was a lot of fun and the content was so thought provoking. The five scholars began presenting what they each thought was the biggest problem for South Africa's youth. Then the panelists each responded, then there was a bit of back and forth where the scholars and audience could ask questions to the panelists and the panelists could also respond to each other.

There were a couple of things that made the format particularly great. The fact that the scholars began things, and the panelists had to listen to them and then respond to them, was fantastic. Dr Boraine actually commented on what a good statement that was making, that they had to listen first. And when Mr Manuel's turn came to speak he told the scholars that he was now getting his turn to speak to power :)

It was also good to have the scholars just present what they thought of as problems. They started off quite timid but as they were encouraged by the audience and the MC they became bolder - you should have heard the last girl criticise Julius Malema and the ANC! The first girl shope about racism, the second guy about lack of facilities at his school, the third about abuse of girls and rape, the forth girl about apathy and the final girl about lack of leadership to inspire young people.

Then the panelists responded and raised so many interesting issues. And the back and forth between panelists and scholars and audience was fantastic, because it really was a conversation. Not just listening to some important person making a speech.

I wrote a short article about the event for my student newspaper but it was *so* difficult because so many interesing issues were discussed...

Some of them were racism, corruption, BEE, education, the media, breaking the cycle of poverty, changing people's attitudes to grants (very interesting!), living in a democracy, responsibility, Julius Malema (wow that guy made himself newsworthy!) ...
So interesting!

Maybe I will write a couple of followup posts about what was said. Probably the main theme running through it all was started by the scholar who said that apathy is a problem because democracy requires citizen participation to work. Trevor Manuel picked this up in his response and spoke about the fact that ultimately all people have to take responsability for their own lives, and that democracy is a social compact between the government and people, and citizens have to take up the responsability of making it work, along with government. And how in many ways the problems we have in making our society work are problems of individual values. Our education system, for example, is extremely well funded. But things fall down in schools where many of teachers have no work ethic...

I could go on - the discussion about social grants was so interesting too!

But let me stop there.

Suffice it to say that is was really a remarkable event. Maybe one day Rhodes will consider doing them too.

Let me just end with my favourite moment from the event: A journalist had just adjusted the mike in front of Trevor Manuel, when Mr Manuel moaned about the media, describing them as (to quote!) "low quality sensationalist clap trap."
!!!

Ah but I sympathise with his sentiments!