Colonial Childhoods and Young MK Freedom Fighters in an Apartheid Past by Jo-Anne Dillabough

In this chapter, I explore the role of coloniality in the making of youth activist lives in the context of apartheid in South Africa. The primary questions posed are as follows: how does one learn urban youth activism driven by eugenics logics while simultaneously navigating the epistemic margins of knowledge-making, particularly when such marginal experiences are born out ‘of struggle’? And how do these experiences reflect youthful ‘epistemologies of the South’? To engage these questions, I utilise an anti-imperialist theoretical lens, energised by the twin resources of memory and the archive, focusing upon young uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Freedom Fighters, some of the youngest ever recruited to the group in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Living memories of youthful MK activist experiences are brought together with commensurate archival data to reveal what it was like to be a young MK freedom fighter excluded from the state-making project that then marked the political geographies of the South. These ‘vocabularies of remembrance’ point to new lexicons for understanding the role that eugenics knowledge-making played in young MK activist lives and expose the conditions that propelled politically motivated young African National Congress (ANC) lives to challenge not only the apartheid state but also the very idea of what it meant to be young on the urban frontier.