The meaning of Youth Day, 16 June 2025, stretches back into the past as well into the future. Many years on, are we any closer to realising the values and ideals that this day is meant to represent?
A story of the transition: Way back in the early 1990s, at the close of a meeting in the Central Hotel in Colesberg, a prominent local role player, Abraham Kruger, asked Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota — then still a prominent member of the ANC — about its association with the SACP. In response, Lekota said this was about tried and tested friendships — he defended the association on the grounds that one could not simply drop old and good friends. My sense of the exchange was that, even in politics, friendship should be respected. In retrospect, this may seem simplistic and even naïve. So much has changed in the intervening 30 years. Are we any closer?
Friends, friendships, contexts: Much of this change has been technological, in local and global power relations, and in the understanding and application of ideologies, all central to the survival of the human species. Are we any closer?
Basic and advanced media positions: The classic media model of asking WHAT? WHEN? WHERE and WHO? has shifted, as have the follow-up questions of HOW and WHY? Friends and friendships have not escaped this. Nor can they escape the changing roles of new digital communications and communicators. Are we any closer?
Protagonists, antagonists, neutralists: Protagonists, antagonists and neutralists alike are having to ask, who are or who could be their friends? There are new facts, new perspectives and new agendas. Are we any closer?
Comments, commentators, challenges: We’re delighted at the steady progress made by our modest website, and the growing volume of sensible and lively comments provoked by our posts. At the same time, we’ve been dismayed by hostile responses to some of our established, more polemical constributors, to the point of facing demands that we should not publish them at all. This despite the fact that we reflect a a range of contrasting views from a broad range of independently minded writers. New times clearly call for new forms of analysis. Are we any closer?
Closer to the bone: The title of one of my favourite songs, The Closer to the Bone, the Sweeter is the Meat, can also apply to the changing media and changing friends and friendships. Are we any closer?
Mr Lakota of course abandoned his tried and tested friendships when he jumped ship and formed the infamous COPE party, but that is a story for another day.