Ernest Bazanye
When I was a kid no one told me I was going to lead the world in my future. I missed out on all that self-esteem.
When I was a kid, youth wasn’t as revered as it is in this era of the millionaire influencer. In my day kids would sit down quietly out of the way when important life stuff was happening. We were not asked or expected to engage in leading anything.
Now I am fifty and your day looks almost deviant in how it differs from my day, almost perverse in how prevalent the praise for youth is.
Youth is treated as the ultimate virtue, the peak of human experience, it is almost fetishised. At some point since I left mine, youth shot up the envy charts past beauty, intelligence, and even Africanness to the top spot. It’s the best thing you can be, right?
Right?
Nah. They haven’t told you the whole truth. No one tells kids the truth, son, and when tomorrow arrives not only won’t you lead it, you won’t even be young anymore. The culture that adored you yesterday will abandon you like the false lover it is, and rush to seduce the next batch of youngins over. You are only the last-born until the next-born.
Someone said this to me during the pandemic, when I was five years less old, but still not young: he said I was being such “an old man” because I had an extra face mask in a plastic bag in my back pocket, snug with my sanitized pen and notebook.
Until that moment I had thought we were both adults, but just then I was gobsmacked. I reacted with what I feel may have been a rather inhospitable display of shock. I let my jaw drop and none of my contempt was concealed. I was shocked. Shocked because I suddenly, abruptly realised that he…I don’t mean this condescendingly, because it doesn’t make you less of a human to be young… but I realised he was immature.
I realised that he had not yet left that stage.
He still thinks that his will is stronger than the dangers of the world. He defines his relation to the world based on what he prefers and what makes him feel coolest, not what actually is. He thinks that if he doesn’t want to be harmed, he will not be. He thinks that the world of adversities and enemies are no match for his ego. He is still well, too young to get it.
You know why it is that when you hear of people drag-racing Subarus up and down Lugogo Bypass after midnight, it is people in their twenties? When you hear of people experimenting with drugs, it’s twenties peeps? People in their twenties take more risks because of their sense of invincibility. Maybe they haven’t failed enough, or maybe they just don’t see the stats, but kids take more risks. This might sometimes be a good thing. But not when they go to crowded clandestine dance parties during pandemics.
But maturity comes with the understanding that you may imagine yourself to be as special as you want, but the slings and arrows still know where you are and they are not deterred by your disdain for them. It does not matter how cool you think you are. Wear the fucking mask.
When I was a youth myself it was in the late 90s and early 00s, the tail-end of the Save The Aged trend which dismissed younger people as ignorant, half-baked, less significant than older people. When I was a youth myself, I expected to be herded to the periphery. It was the norm. Potential was one thing, but it can never beat experience.
When I started work as a journalist in a professional news media bullpen, my agemates and I were not expected to do anything but “youth” work. We were relegated to writing about music concerts, TV celebs, Rasta Rob, RS Elvis and the contestants of that year’s Miss Uganda.
One of my boys at the time was (and still is) ambitious af. He smelled more money in the farming section, the business section, the Women’s section and the Regional News section and, since we were paid per story, he threw his already prodigious talent into all of them. We followed him with our post-pubescent herd-mind soon after, and I remember the first time we all celebrated having had a story in every pull-out section of the paper that week: farming, business, politics, entertainment, children. We pulled the full week. Including the Youth section.
Soon we were finally being taken seriously by the more seasoned journos and from then on we enjoyed a convivial if not actually friendly relationship with the older reporters. We were competitors, because that is what freelancers are in a big-media bullpen, but we were colleagues. We were not the kids, we were equal in the fraternity of hacks, we were teammates if not worthy rivals.
Except that we had more time. And ambition. Being young made me hungry. I think a lot of today’s prodigies feel the same way. I know we all know a kid who is tearing down mountains just because someone said she couldn’t do it. But I fear that, the way we talk about youth these days, it is making some of you complacent. Being centred by default, with no one trying to shove you away means you don’t feel that you have to prove yourselves, so you don’t push yourselves as hard.
But this is the truth: If you are any good, you get better with time. If your talents are prodigious now, if your skills are real, you get better with time. If you already believe in what you bring to the table now, twenty years from today, that table will crash into splinters under the weight of your serving.
If, however, you are, as we all were, raw, novice, untested, unproven, crude and inexperienced, then time is what you need to become refined, veteran, successful, self-evident, perfect proof of the real deal.
I guess what we need is for young people to believe in yourselves and what you are and what you can be. But don’t believe those ads that tell you you are already at the peak.
You need to be hungry, not satisfied. You need to be hungry, not content. You need to feel like the world doesn’t believe in you and that you have to prove yourself. You need to be hungry enough to go and hunt.
Because if you don’t, you will waste your youth.
Time and years give you perspective. You can see more from higher up. Let’s see the maths:
0–10 you are an infant. It doesn’t count.
1–20 you are adolescent. It doesn’t count.
If you begin your adulthood at twenty with youth, and surrender your youth at 30 (I will allow for 35 if you will return the grace by adjusting the scale to start at 25: that’s when you get out of university) and then go back to God at 70 or 75, then, like Sheek said, you are going to be older way longer than you are going to be younger.
Only a fifth of your adult life will be youth. The bulk of it, the most significant portion, the rest of it, the life that is your life, the main event itself, the actual meat, is going to be this side, this part. Your twenties are not life itself. Your twenties are just the preliminary to life itself. That is where you determine what life itself will be. Will you be harvesting what you sowed, or paying for sins?
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