What's moral for township youth?

Being good in a bad world: What's 'moral' for township youth?

How does growing up in a township affect your moral formation? Does it impact negatively or positively? Are township youth more or less moral than their middle-class counterparts? These were the key questions that led SHARLENE SWARTZ to conduct her doctoral research on the moral lives of South Africa�s township youth.

Over 15 months, 37 young people, aged between 15 and 19 who live in the Langa-Khayelitsha corridor of Cape Town, spoke openly and in a sophisticated way of their understanding of morality. They exhibited conventional values in areas such as substance use, violence and crime, while questioning conservative values around sex, money and respect. Despite self-identifying much of their behaviour as 'wrong', young people locate themselves as overwhelming 'good' while positioning others as either protected 'mommy's babies', 'right ones', 'skollies' or 'kasi boy/girl'.

Skollies and mommy�s babies

�Mommy�s babies� isolated themselves from the social environment and spent most of their time with immediate family members, did not drink or use drugs, were sometimes involved in church, and were in school and off the streets.

�Right ones� were exposed to township youth culture, participated judiciously, and intentionally deflected its �wrong� elements. Some drank and had experimented with various substances, but never enough to �overdose� or detract from their goals of a job, house, car and being able to take care of younger siblings and mothers. They were in school, focused on the future, off the streets at night and slept at home. They successfully deflected the prevailing youth culture, without being �uncool�.

In contrast kasi boys or girls �overdosed� on alcohol, parties, and dagga. Girls become pregnant as part of the �fashion� and boys had multiple girlfriends so no-one could call you isiShumane (a shoemaker) for having none, or only one partner. These youth were sometimes involved in petty theft, especially of cell phones, and got involved in violence �without thinking� and �over small things�. They were in and out of school, on the streets at night and seldom home. They both absorbed the prevailing youth culture and tried regularly to reform their ways.

Skolllies or gangsters were the group who were least supervised, were generally out of school, ruled the streets at night and frequently were away from home. While some were involved in formal gangs, many were involved in selling drugs, in car hijacking and housebreaking. They used alcohol copiously, and were also users of dagga, Mandrax and tik.

Mothers, younger siblings, friends and romantic partners

Besides these categorisations of self and others, these young people spoke highly of their mothers, younger siblings, friends and romantic partners � as providing the motivation to be �right ones�.

Mothers� examples of hard work and unconditional love made young people want to succeed and �stay out of trouble�. They feel obliged to be �role models� to younger siblings. Friends encourage young people to stay in school, and romantic partners frequently inspire them to �become a better person�. Xolile commented that his girlfriend tells him if he �takes a wrong step� and �we sit down and talk about it�. These influences are frequently overlooked (especially mothers and younger siblings) or disparaged as sources of peer pressure (friends), and sources of premature or unsafe sexual practices (romantic partners).

Encouraging young people to be protective and caring towards mothers, role models to younger siblings, �right� friends to each other and to nurture values that arise out of close relationships (such as selflessness and a desire to be a better person for their partners) presents an unexplored opportunity for moral education that builds on young people�s understandings of positive influences in their lives.

Work as a moral driver

While these young people seldom blamed their external environment for their behaviour, they clearly portrayed the link between employment, success, and moral goodness. For these township youth completing school and securing a job was the key to leaving behind substance use, crime, and to providing a better life for mothers and younger siblings.

When young people were asked why a picture of people working was a �good� moral influence, the most commonly cited answers explained the connection between work as a deterrent to crime. Nonkiza tells me �if people cannot buy things themselves, they are stealing other people�s things�, while Andiswa explains why she took a photograph of a 17 year-old young man selling sweets and chips at the train station saying �he�s selling to people � to try and make some money. And instead of doing crime, he just did something else�.

In addition to pictures of work in progress, a number of young people took pictures of friends or older siblings, not to describe them as moral influences, but to point to the fact that they were working as positive moral influences. Xolile photographed a friend outside a tavern holding a knife and drinking brandy, and said �[This is] my friend Kgomotso. He�s a good influence because he work�. Xolile�s picture highlights the magnitude of importance that work assumes in the lives of these young people, as a source of moral rightness, in spite of other moral questions which, for instance, holding a knife and drinking alcohol may present.

Poseletso summed up young people�s association between morality and work most profoundly when she concludes that �education should be free... so that [young people] can study and then � become good people when they have got their own jobs� instead of �end up staying in the street � doing all those things�.

The impact of poverty on morality

The study also showed that these township youth frequently fail to reflect, yet given caring adult intervention, they do so with enthusiasm. Sadly, in impoverished contexts, adult supervision, both at home and at school are in short supply.

Furthermore, poverty results in a multitude of physical and psychological sequelae , many of which make it difficult to make moral judgements and act on them.

This opens up the problematic question about whether poor youth are more or less moral than their middle-class counterparts. The answer depends largely on what is meant by �being moral�. If by moral we mean doing the good, then the answer is yes � some poor youth are less moral than their middle-class counterparts. But if by moral we mean knowing the good, desiring the good, and having a moral self identity, then the answer is a resounding no. The poor youth in this study possessed all three of these latter facets of morality, but seemed to lack the resources (not all, but the majority) to act on their beliefs. These physical, mental and emotional resources need to form a further focus for moral education programmes.

Conclusion

South African township youth inhabit a world fraught with horror, violence, crime and substance abuse, but they also have a remarkable sense of right and wrong, a fact frequently ignored by the official quest for �moral regeneration�. Most of these youth are good people who live unsupervised and live non-reflective lives. Of course, many do bad things, which given the availability and pervasiveness of alcohol and drugs, become entrenched. But showcasing young people�s efforts to be �good� despite living in �a bad world�, and making an effort to deal with the consequences of poverty, should form an alternative agenda for nurturing young people�s moral formation in schools and communities.