The Lord of the Flies' legions

Jonathan Jansen: Thousands of children stream out of Soweto schools onto the streets in protests. Police confront them with rubber bullets and water cannon.

The swelling numbers of students leave the classrooms to demand justice. They are met with the full force of mounted police and armed vehicles. Soweto 1976?

No, Soweto 2010. The fight against apartheid education? No, no, no - the students are surrounding the police cells and the magistrate's court where another young man and his fellow drag-racing driver are being held in a police station for allegedly mowing down six school pupils, killing four and maiming two.

Did the students leave school to mourn the loss of their friends and to see justice take its course in the courts of a democratic South Africa?

No, their posters make it clear that they came to kill the man with the curious name of Jub Jub.

It is impossible to measure the depth of despair and desperation, the loss of the families of those killed in this senseless act of murder (as the charge sheet alleges) by two drag-racing drivers who, it is also alleged, were high on illegal substances.

One can only imagine the pain of the loss of fellow matriculants, sitting at their desks next to you in school one day and only a few days later being lowered into dusty graves, never to be seen again.

The anger of families, school mates and community is understandable.

That said, take another look at the series of photographs and video-streams of our young people in Soweto. For, if you look carefully, you will see your future and the future of your country. And when you do that, be afraid - be very afraid.

These are not "learners", as official policy documents of the government's education departments so euphemistically called post-apartheid youth. These are potential killers. Their logic is simple: You kill our friends, we kill you.

I have absolutely no doubt that if that crowd of young people were to lay hands on Jub Jub and his fellow accused, they would be physically torn apart by the rage of these vengeful teenagers.

It is not only what happened in Soweto that should concern us. In the growing number of service-delivery protests the youthfulness of the protestors should scare us.

They are not at school. They are manning the barricades.

They dodge bullets and the police. Some of them are armed with rocks and more deadly projectiles. This is not about the legitimacy of the protests; that is another debate.

What concerns me as a teacher and a citizen is something much more serious: that we are breeding a new generation of youthful South Africans who are learning early to be angry, deadly angry, without adult intervention and without political or pedagogical correction.

Take another look, South Africa. This is your future. Yes, these young people are "learning" - but not the rhythms of aerobic respiration or the construction of line graphs. They are learning to kill on instinct. They are learning to bypass judicial processes and to demand instant justice.

They might have reason, of course, to distrust the law - after all, you can kill and maim and still, as in this case, be released on bail of a mere R10,000. But that, too, is another debate, for on the streets of South Africa something horrible is happening, something much more devastating than any teacher in a disciplined school could ever produce.

We are producing and reproducing (yes, that's the word) a new generation of cold, callous, clinically dangerous youths who will not be in training or employment. They will slay a family for a television set, shoot a pedestrian for a cellphone. They will rape, and walk (not run) away.

Our finest historians will tell you dangerous behaviour does not just happen. Communities do not simply "snap" and wipe out foreigners. This deadly behaviour comes from deep in our history and (here's the bad news) it is carried inter-generationally unless there is drastic intervention that breaks or interrupts the rhythms of destructive actions.

There are role models for angry, bitter and vengeful youth. Student organisations that once bore proud anti-apartheid credentials have morphed into something sinister and pernicious while unfairly drawing on (and sullying) the reputations of earlier movements of the same name.

It is no longer enough to keep young people in school for, as in the case of these Soweto youths; it is in school that they learn to be bitter and organise to be vengeful.

Take another look at our young people. You were warned.

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