Chapter 14 - Fighting for ‘our little freedoms’: The evolution of student and youth politics in Phomolong township, Free State

Summary

Phomolong township, situated six kilometres from the small town of Hennenman in the Free State, has received increased scholarly interest following its experience of service delivery protests in 2005. Similarly, there has been a great deal of interest in young political mobilisation and collective action under apartheid. Particularly intriguing is the belated development of youth political mobilisation in the Free State and the varying reasons for this. It is argued here that the genesis of youth political organising in Phomolong can only be understood against the backdrop of the expansion of secondary schooling in the 1970s and 1980s. The permanent presence of a young generation of students at high school level was absent in this area until the late 1970s. In this absence of networks with established organisations, the “locality” became a critical space for politicisation. Far from being an easy exercise, challenging the powers of local authorities was a complex and contradictory process. The kinship-like relations with councillors, their entrenched presence in the area as revered “elders” and their location in the teaching profession meant that most of those who later opposed them had actually benefited from their tutelage at one point or another. Finally, the chapter argues that the emergence of a vigilante group – Bontate (the fathers) – comprised almost exclusively of fathers and older male relatives of the young activists confirms that youth political activity took a noticeable shape in the latter part of the 1980s.

Seekings and Twala pin the belated formation of youth political structures in the Free State on a number of realities including the population size of some of its townships at the time (only four townships boasted a population of more than 20 000 people), the relative isolation and disparate location of these townships with respect to one another, as well as their distance from urban areas that displayed decisive political mobilisation, particularly Johannesburg. Equally emphasised in the literature is the absence of educational institutions in the province that could be compared to Turfloop and Fort Hare as ‘incubators of organised dissent’. Unlike the relatively industrialised north-western part of the area, which is close to industrial centres like Sasolburg and boasts considerable strength in trade union organisation, the possibilities for political mobilisation in the southern Free State were limited by its overwhelmingly agricultural orientation.