My first day of fieldwork was spent driving around Khayelitsha in a minibus taxi, as local pop songs blasted from the speakers. The six high school students in the van danced and sang along. Out the window, street scenes flashed by us, as we made our way to the offices of the social movement Equal Education located in Kwezi Park2. Founded in 2008, E.E advocates for improved education standards in South Africa. It is a social movement comprised of learners, parents, teachers and community members working for quality and equality in education. For five weeks I worked with these six black3 students, referred to as Equalisers, who are aged between 16-20. They are part of E.E’s media advocacy project called Amawzi Wethu (A.W) - our voices4. There were five girls Amanda, Sisanda, Lorna, Kedibone, Phelokazi and one boy Siphonathi nicknamed ‘Chief’. They came from different schools and met through their involvement in A.W. The program focused on teaching them how to make media content for E.E’s campaigns. The aim was for the content to serve as a tool for advocacy, amplifying the voice of the youth led social movement.
Khayelitsha is an informal settlement, which means ‘new home’ in isiXhosa. Established by the Apartheid government in 1983, it is roughly 30km from the city of Cape Town. The 2011 Census figures reflected a population of 400 000, 40% of whom are under 20 years of age5. South Africa’s cities face massive challenges, largely due to Apartheid urban planning design. Informal settlements are growing, and infrastructure backlogs are widespread. The 1990s saw an influx of people from the Eastern Cape seeking employment opportunities, yet fifty percent of the population is unemployed6. Electricity ‘nyonga’7 wires crisscross the skyline. These ‘borrowed’ lines provide unstable power for many residents who live in small informal dwellings that locals call
2 Fig.3
3. In this thesis I use racial terminology familiar to South Africans: ‘white’, ‘black’, and ‘coloured’ have ambiguous status, I am complicit in entrenching their racial meanings by using them, while remaining true to local speech.
4 Fig.2
5 National Treasury, Confronting Youth Unemployment: Policy Options for South Africa. available at
http://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/national%20budget/2011/Confronting %20youth%20unemployment%20- %20Policy%20options.pdf
6 Sinclair-Smith,K. & Turok,I. 2012 The changing spatial economy of cities: An exploratory analysis of Cape Town, Development Southern Africa, 29:3, 391-417
7 isiXhosa (snake)
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shacks. Provision of services such as water, sanitation, and electricity feature strongly in local struggles for access to public services. However, Khayelitsha’s housing is not completely ‘informal’. There are mortar and brick homes with shiny new cars parked behind security gates. The area faces difficulties with infrastructure and crime, but is also filled with aspiring and vibrant communities, and is the place the students I worked with all call home.
In this dissertation, I seek to understand how a youth media discourse is evidenced in specific localities. Critical enquiry into the way ‘empowerment’ and ‘agency’ manifest themselves is explored. There is a limitation embedded in a framework that installs empowerment as the end goal. It tends to position individuals as key agents of change in the face of broader structural inequalities. There is a relative short supply of scholarship about media advocacy projects, that focuses on the perspective of the youth involved8. In resource-poor communities young people face limited access to platforms of self- expression. Most of the largely under resourced high schools in Khayelitsha do not offer creative subjects and there are limited extramural opportunities available9. The process of telling stories creates a space to develop a perception of the self in relation to a wider audience. This can allow for cathartic expression, particularly in a difficult environment where levels of violence are incredibly high. Many young people feel that they are not listened to by their elders, nor are their opinions reflected in the mainstream media.
George Marcus speaks of the “activist imaginary” to express how marginalized groups use media to make new claims of citizenship10. Social agents navigate the opportunities available, scrambling for platforms that allow for forms of inclusion to be realized. Youth media programs become important in engaging individual’s strengths, developing their self-confidence that creates a space to dream and exercise social mobility. The social movement utilizes particular activist strategies in order to harness collective mobilization. Individual voices and the films they make, stand in for the wider movement in order for them to be used as advocacy tools.
8 Hauge,C. 2014 Youth media and agency, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35:4, 471-484 9 Azania,M 2014. Memoirs of a Born Free. Auckland Park: Jacana Media, 12-34
10 Marcus et al Ginsburg,F. 1996 ‘Introduction’ in Media Worlds Ginsburg, Faye D ; Abu-Lughod, Lila ; Larkin, Brian (eds) Berkeley : University of California Press 2002, 39-58
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Within this dynamic I am interested in how a balance between the individual and the collective is carefully navigated. My basic research question follows:
“What are the activist imaginaries of young social actors in an ‘informal settlement’ and what kind of expressive platforms do they access within the social space that they navigate?”
