"I don't believe in loans, I believe in bursaries"

Gathered outside Pachu General Dealer in Kanye, Eastern Cape, are a group of the village’s latest school leavers, the 2009 matriculants, already propping up the shebeen wall at 11am on a Friday morning.

The night before I’d met Ellen Hlakula, Walter Sisulu’s daughter-in-law. She lives in the biggest house in the village (with her own tap in the garden, no sharing). She said she was happy because democracy had brought change, but she lamented what alcohol was doing to the youngsters.

“Our problem is the bottle stores. There are so many bottle stores. They are disturbing our lives. Our children are drinking and taking drugs. We are so worried about that. Life is not all right because of the alcohol. They are drinking because they are not working. They are bored. This has made them corrupt," she said.

It’s not easy for “the youth of today” to have a good reputation at the best of times, but as I wandered around chatting to villagers, I realised the youth here have a reputation as either being layabouts who view democracy as their "right" to do nothing, or as thieves who steal from pensioners to fund their drinking. I wondered how they saw themselves.

Singalakha Mnquma (third from the right), 18, finished matric in 2009 at Loveday High School in Bhisho. He’s visiting Kanye, his family’s home village, for the weekend to attend a funeral.

"Democracy brings a lot of things, but I don’t know where they’ve ended up. It just brought grants for small kids, that’s the only thing I know about democracy. That’s a fact. There are no opportunities. There are more than 30 guys here who don’t know what to do.
Now I think there is no point in going to school. After you finish studying there are no jobs, we are just sitting here. In South Africa, I don’t know what’s going on. You just end up back here with your diploma.”

His friend, Sipheshle Hlakula (fourth from the right), 21, spent one year studying to be an electrician in East London after matriculating, but failed and now his parents can’t (or won’t, it wasn’t clear) pay for him to study further. “Life was way easier for my father and grandfather. In those days there were job opportunities. The important thing is to have a job. All I want is to have a job. Democracy has made me unemployed.”

The village pensioners I chatted with definitely agreed that it was much easier to get work in the dark days of apartheid, when trucks would arrive from Jo'burg and Durban to cart young men off to work on the gold mines and sugar cane plantations. I was always under the impression that people resented this migrant-labour lifestyle, but all the old fellas spoke fondly of these times. (It's also fair to say that the old fellas in Yorkshire talk fondly of WW2, and no one's wishing the world at war again anytime soon.)

What puzzled me though, and this is a topic on which I want to do more research, is where are the student loans for poor kids from poor, rural families? Surely they must exist, and if they do, why don’t these guys know about them?

I explained to Singalakha that most of my friends paid for their university/college education from a student loan, and are still paying them back. For kids from ordinary working class families, the only way to get ahead was to invest in your own future. His response: “I don’t believe in loans, I believe in bursaries”. It spun my head. We'd all love a rich fairy godmother to lubricate our way in life, but if that's who we're waiting for, we might have to wait by that pumpkin for a long time.

Looking back over the two weeks I spent interviewing people in this part of the old Transkei, one thing I heard over and over was: "The government hasn't... the government must... we're waiting for the government..." It was as if the government is a fairy godmother, with all the power and knowledge and magic dust to solve all the country's problems. And why do people think this? Is it because this is the message that the ANC government has sold to the people - as if they can buck the trend of every government the world has ever seen?

Where's the message that democracy does not equal communism? That to get ahead, you have to invest in yourself? There's no doubt the ANC has failed in its delivery of key services to rural people, but they also seemed to have failed to fill them in on what democracy really is good for - the freedom to make your own future.