COMMENT: Carol Moses, who led an anti-apartheid march at the age of 14, was one of the independent youth leaders of the 1980s overlooked by the ANC leadership when it came to power, william_gumede writes.
Carol Moses, who died at the age of 50 recently after a short illness, symbolised the marginalisation in the post-apartheid ANC and South Africa of some of the great talent of the movement in the 1980s.
The youths of the 1980s are not as celebrated as those of 1976 but, in terms of the loss of innocence and education, and the inculcation of a new culture of violence, they may have paid a higher price. Pupils called for democratically elected student representative councils, and supported community and worker struggles. High school activists became involved in bread-and-butter community struggles, protesting over high rents, lack of public transport and the need for better wages for black workers.
That kind of trauma scars a person for life, often affecting their health, intimate relationships and politics. It is extraordinary that, throughout her life, Moses remained caring and warm, and laughed easily., one of the great rural community newspapers of the 1980s, during a time when these anti-apartheid newspapers were flourishing around the country, despite being banned regularly, sabotaged and attacked violently by the apartheid security forces.
Moses took up the cudgels for students who were being excluded because of a lack of money and lobbied for a national student aid scheme and for gender equality. The early-1990s generation of ANC-aligned student leaders were among the first to call for the unity of the anti-apartheid black and white national student movements to symbolically lead the way to reconciliation across the colour line in national politics. UWC at the time dominated black national student politics and the issue of whether the time was ripe to unite the two wings of the student movement while apartheid was still entrenched deeply divided the student body.
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