Broken Inheritance: What We’ve Done to the Children of Freedom

South Africa is a country of the young. Statistically, the majority of its population is under the age of 35. One would expect that such a youthful demographic might signal a bright horizon — a generation that could carry the country forward with energy, innovation, and purpose. But lived reality tells a far more disturbing story. The youth of today, particularly in our black townships, do not reflect hope — they reflect dysfunction. They are not heirs of a dream, but victims of its betrayal.

In these townships, young black people dominate the landscape, but it is not with the fervour of the 1944 generation who radicalised the ANC, nor with the intellectual defiance of 1966 or the revolutionary courage of 1976. It is not even with the embattled survivalism of 1986. No — this is a generation marked not by resistance, but by collapse. A generation raised in the moral ruins of ANC politics. A generation fluent in excess, addicted to performance, and distanced from accountability.

There is more money in the black community today than at any other time in our history. Yet with this rise in economic participation has come an unexpected cultural erosion. It is not wealth in the hands of a generation raised with strong values — it is often unearned money, unsupervised, and disconnected from responsibility. Some  of these young people  have been raised in single-parent homes headed by black women, not by choice but by necessity — often in conditions created by the very government that claimed to liberate us. These women have fought to keep their families afloat, often alone and unsupported — but the result, in some cases, has been a generation starved of structure, vulnerable to performative rebellion, and disturbingly dismissive of wisdom. Among this group, there is a peculiar and troubling belief that anyone over 50 is irrelevant. Ridicule and passive aggression toward older citizens is common. It is part of the woke culture, a digital-age nihilism amplified by the theatre of social media — the most toxic space in our democratic society.

We saw this most disturbingly during the #FeesMustFall movement. While the call for accessible education was necessary and just, the movement also revealed something darker in our youth — a penchant for cruelty masquerading as justice. Take the tragic case of Professor Bongani Mayosi, a brilliant and principled black academic who took his own life after being targeted and vilified during the protests. Mayosi was not an enemy of transformation; he had been a lifelong servant of black excellence. But in the hysteria and heat of the protest, driven by a performance of radicalism, he became a symbol of the establishment to be torn down. That was the moment something broke. When those who fight for justice begin to turn on their own with such venom, we must ask: what kind of culture are we cultivating?

This is a generation that holds a strange and toxic view of ageing. In their worldview, anyone over 50 is already irrelevant — a relic, a burden, an object of ridicule. You see this most clearly on social media, that modern arena of vulgar democracy, where cruelty masquerades as critique. What used to be the privilege of elders — the voice of experience, memory, and wisdom — is now treated as a punchline. It is in this space that podcasters like MacG feel free to speak about women with the most dehumanising vulgarity, as he did when he publicly degraded Minnie Dlamini. And the worst part is not that it was said — it is that it felt normal to so many who heard it. That is the true tragedy: we have normalized indecency.

Even in professional spaces, this cult of youth persists. Recently on 702 radio station, I listened how Stephen Grotes, was humorously  mocked — not for his work, but for the simple fact that he matriculated in 1993. This was not a fringe response from anonymous trolls. It came from colleagues and callers, many of them under 40, intoxicated by the delusion that youth is not just a phase of life but a moral virtue in itself. What kind of society mocks competence and worships inexperience?

Our institutions are collapsing under the weight of this thinking. Public service, which once valued mentorship, continuity, and institutional memory, is now a revolving door for youth with degrees but no depth. Retirement is no longer a dignified exit — it is a purge. Those with decades of service are discarded like expired goods, their expertise unrecognised and their contribution erased. The ANC government itself has had to admit the disastrous consequences of this thinking. Not long ago, it sent out a desperate call for retired Eskom engineers to return and rescue our crumbling energy grid. A silent confession is indeed that the younger engineers — while qualified on paper — lacked the kind of experience that keeps a nation’s lights on.

We have allowed a false binary to flourish: that youth equals progress and age equals obstruction. But a society that refuses to honour experience will repeat its mistakes in endless, bloodier cycles. And we are already seeing it — in the hospitals that no longer function, in the schools that breed anger more than intellect, in the administrative offices where no one knows what they’re doing anymore.

Curiously enough this is not an argument against youth — it is an argument against what we have done to our youth. We gave them a broken moral compass, a violent political culture, and empty slogans about freedom. We offered no rites of passage, no elders to walk with them, and no shared national purpose to root their existence in meaning. We created a generation that is old before its time — cynical, hollowed out, and suspicious of anything that asks for sacrifice.

It did not have to be this way. South Africa had a moment, a real one, when it could have invested in values, in intergenerational partnerships, in healing the wounds of the past through mentorship and continuity. But instead, we chose slogans over substance, popularity over principle, and youth as a brand, not a burden of responsibility. Is it surprising a young leader such as Malema keeps on stubbornly singing a chant that divides and alienates a section of our population.

Now we live with the consequences — a nation dominated by its most inexperienced and most angry citizens. And we pretend to be surprised. This is not a condemnation of young people, but a lament for what has been done to them — and what they have been taught to become. We have created a country where performance counts for more than depth, where elders are discarded like yesterday’s news, and where social justice has been hijacked by spectacle. We replaced moral clarity with trend cycles. We mistook youth for insight, and novelty for progress. But there can be no progress when a people lose respect for time, for process, for the wisdom that only years — and often wounds — can produce.

In the rush to democratize, we have forgotten to restore human dignity. There is something deeply undignified about a society that mocks its elders, that buries its intellectuals under hashtags, that pushes out experience to make way for expediency. And the tragedy is that in doing so, we have disarmed the very youth we claim to be empowering. We have not prepared them for the real work of building — only for the fantasy of being seen.

The spirit of the 1976 generation — and those before and after — was never about visibility alone. It was about vision. It was about sacrifice. It was about taking up the burdens of history and choosing to become more than what the system had allowed. But what do you say to a generation that has inherited democracy, yet lives in despair? Who live surrounded by money, but feel no wealth of purpose? Who inherit institutions stripped bare, and who now must build with no tools, no guidance, and no elders to walk beside them?

Perhaps the time has come for a reckoning — not with youth, but with the culture we have allowed to rise in the vacuum left by failed leadership and moral decay. We need not shame the young, but we must call them back to substance. Back to humility. Back to the truth that no nation can grow on noise alone. A people cannot hashtag their way to greatness.

We owe them better than what we have given. But they too owe something in return — to listen before they tear down, to ask before they accuse, to understand that those who came before were not perfect, but they were not all villains either.

To build a country, to truly build it, requires something far more difficult than anger: it requires maturity. It requires love tethered to truth. And that is the real task of a generation — not to perform rebellion, but to grow into responsibility. That is how a nation rises again, or it does not rise at all.