The encounters that build a country

In 1994, a man called Steve came to our school to tell us about a youth programme called RALI - Responsible Action Leadership Initiative.

He explained what it involved, mentioned the price (R 1500 if I remember correctly) and said that anyone interested should stay behind.

I stayed, although I knew the fee would be a hard sell at home.

My parents were not poor. They were careful with money and did not spend it on things they considered unnecessary. They had already made the kind of choices many working and middle class black parents were making at the time: stretching to put their children into “Model C” schools because those schools seemed to offer a route into a better future.

A youth leadership programme was another matter.

Then, in the smaller briefing after the presentation, Steve told us the programme was sponsored. He also said something I have never forgotten: simply by staying behind, we had already shown him something.

I applied. I was accepted.

For the next nine months, RALI brought us into sustained contact with young people from across the South African spectrum. Different races, cultures, schools, communities and family circumstances. We spent time together, went on camps, tackled challenges and learned from one another.

This was 1994.

South Africa had voted itself into democracy, and we were learning how to be a country together. Apartheid had organised our lives to keep us apart. We knew categories. We knew assumptions. We did not necessarily know one another. RALI created the encounter.

It did not bring us together for a staged dialogue or a photograph. We spent enough time together for the easy performances to wear thin. We had to listen, negotiate, disagree, depend on one another and discover the human beings behind the identities we had inherited. That experience seeded something in me.

Much of my later work with young people, institutions and social change can be traced back to what Stephen Jacobs and RALI allowed me to experience that year. Leadership was part of it. But the deeper lesson was that people cannot build a shared future while living in separate worlds.

Thirty-two years later, South African children still grow up remarkably far apart. They may inhabit the same city while living in different countries. They attend schools with radically different resources. They inherit different versions of South Africa. Social media lets them observe and judge one another without ever having to meet. We cannot lecture our way out of that.

Young people need to spend real time together. Not a morning. Not a commemorative event. Enough time to become curious about one another, test their assumptions, form friendships and learn how to work across difference. They need shared experiences that make other people real.

This is why I am so pleased that RALI is back.

Stephen Jacobs founded RALI in 1986, when bringing young South Africans together across racial, cultural and economic boundaries was itself a serious intervention. Around 15,000 young people participated before the original programme ended in 2001. Now Steve is bringing it back for another generation.

Go and look at RALI. Read Steve’s story. If you are a parent, educator, funder or employer, consider what it would mean to help young people enter rooms they would not otherwise enter and build relationships they would not otherwise form.

Our children do not need more speeches about social cohesion. They need to meet one another.

This is how we #GrowZA