Youth at the crossroads

by Kgaugelo Habyane

I was recently stretched, challenged, and inspired by a rich and provocative dialogue between a diverse group of decolonial activists working across Southern Africa. This encounter among ACT Ubambano, the Church Land Programme, and Isiko Lamaqabane at the Jesuit Institute forced me to stand at a metaphorical crossroads. A space that, as our dialogue revealed, is often crowded and public, yet requires deep, solitary discernment. As I sat with the complexity of this space, I found myself reflecting on two vital markers for our youth: the International Day of the Boy Child on May 16 and South African Youth Day on June 16.

These two days serve as landmarks on what the prophet Jeremiah (6:16) calls the “ancient paths”. For the boy child, the crossroad is often marked by the shadows of a deepening masculinity crisis, wounds of fatherlessness and a search for symbols of a new path that doesn’t rely on the compromised pulpits and podiums of the past. For the youth of June 16, the crossroads remain a site of inequality and resistance, where the courage to ask difficult questions often demands vulnerability despite the risk of undesired outcomes. Standing here, we must ask: how do we create a new pathway that is not merely a performance of activism, but a genuine movement toward self and communal agency?

The act of looking requires us to ask difficult questions. The questions we carry orient our attention, shape our actions, and reveal what matters most to us. They help us explore why the body of Christ has sometimes become quiet in the face of adversity and injustice. Yet, as we reflect on the youth of 1976 and some of our recent whistleblowers, we remember that questions have consequences; they can imprison or liberate. In extreme cases, seeking the truth can lead to being silenced, ostracised, or even death. We must interrogate who decides whose voices are heard and who determines which questions are worth responding to.

In our current state of hopelessness and failing legacy systems, there is a danger of falling into the performance of activism. Advocacy can easily become a job or a side hustle rather than a deep-seated vocation. True solidarity, as explored in the ACT Ubambano dialogue, requires a shift from humanitarianism to humanism. It asks us to move away from the pulpits and podiums and instead listen to the voices in the peripheries, the voiceless. This is especially crucial for the boy child, who may be navigating a world of inherited questionable narratives and ways of being while seeking symbols for a new path.

Can we walk new paths without losing our voice? Perhaps the new path is not something we find, but something we create as we walk. This path-making requires new capacities for dealing with uncertainty. It requires a vulnerability that allows us to sit with the complexity of the crossroads without seeking immediate and easy answers.

Ultimately, the goal is to be at home in the dialogue, to recognise that we are not alone at the crossroads. By listening to the marginalised and walking with the excluded, we might finally discover that good and new path that sustains us, even when the systems around us seem to be failing.