Hear young voices in age of uncertainty

Today's youth should remember those who came before them who conquered overwhelming odds

- André Odendaal

The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation's annual National Youth Essay, Poetry & Art Competition Against Racism winners in each category have been collated. This is the introduction to the 2024 winners' booklet.

The young people of every generation must grapple with what it means to be fully human and how best their society should be structured and move forward. And in the book project Power & The Pen, commemorating 200 years of writing in the indigenous languages of our country, I have been reminded just how successful the generations before us have been in defining future paths.

On 3 November 1884, the brilliant 25-year-old John Tengo Jabavu, one of the early generations of mission-educated Africans, brought out the first issue of his newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, or Native Opinion, as it was called in English. He and the "school people" at the time were becoming increasingly critical of the paternalism of the missionary institutions and press in the Cape Colony so they set up their own political organisations and media platforms to fight for African rights. Their motto was "dubula ngosiba" (shoot with the pen). They levelled so much criticism against the existing missionary newspaper, Isigidimi Sama Xhosa, that one observer compared it with a warrior whose enemies had hurled so many spears into his body that he looked like a porcupine.

The founding of Imvo was an important step in the development of the freedom struggle in South Africa. It and the independent black newspapers that followed also became vehicles for indigenous writers and poets such as Jonas Ntsiko and the famous SEK Mqhayi to express themselves in their own languages, thus preserving rich, expressive intellectual cultures and ideas excluded from the classrooms and bookshops of the colonial and apartheid periods - that we can draw on today.