Jeugkrag (meaning "Youth Power"), also known as Youth for South Africa, was a short-lived South African youth group in the late 1980s. It was surreptitiously funded by the

apartheid Apartheid ( , especially South African English: , ; , ) was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was characterised by an ...

government's Department of Military Intelligence in an operation known as Project Essay. Led by Marthinus van Schalkwyk (later a member of the

African National Congress The African National Congress (ANC) is a political party in South Africa. It originated as a liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid and has governed the country since 1994, when the 1994 South African general election, fir ...

) it operated exclusively on Afrikaans university campuses and sought to influence the political views of Afrikaans-speaking students. Van Schalkwyk was the national chairman. He was supported between 1987 and July 1988 by Cedric de Coning, who was both director of fund raising and publicity secretary. Putatively aimed at bringing together youth from different ethnic and ideological backgrounds, Jeugkrag was a transparent effort to supplant the process of youth dialogue originally started by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), an NGO founded at the end of 1986 by the liberal ex-parliamentarians Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine with funding from donors such as the Open Society Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Slabbert and Boraine, who had decamped in frustration from the

tricameral parliament The Tricameral Parliament, officially the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, was the legislature of South Africa between 1984 and 1994, established by the South African Constitution of 1983, which gave a limited political voice to ...

, were part of the white group that held groundbreaking discussions with ANC delegates at the historic Dakar meeting in 1987. The group was vilified by PW Botha, who called them "political terrorists".

Peter Mokaba Peter Mokaba, OLS (7 January 1959 – 9 June 2002) was a member of the South African parliament, deputy minister in the government of Nelson Mandela and president of the South African governing party's youth wing, the ANC Youth League. Th ...

, an ANC leader that Jeugkrag had engaged, would later comment: "At the time although we knew that Jeugkrag was not an independent organization, but part of the heart and soul of the National Party, it was our policy to discuss matters with both progressive and reactionary organizations." In 1990 en route to a meeting in

Botswana Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory part of the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the sou ...

, a 12-person Jeugkrag delegation was detained by police at the Monomotapa Hotel in

Harare Harare ( ), formerly Salisbury, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Zimbabwe. The city proper has an area of , a population of 1,849,600 as of the 2022 Zimbabwe census, 2022 census and an estimated 2,487,209 people in its metrop ...

Zimbabwe file:Zimbabwe, relief map.jpg, upright=1.22, Zimbabwe, relief map Zimbabwe, officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Bots ...

. They were questioned about a meeting that they had attended with members of the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), a marginal political group opposed to Robert Mugabe's government. The delegation consisted exclusively of representatives from Afrikaans-language universities including the Rand Afrikaans University,

Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch University (SU) (, ) is a public research university situated in Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Stellenbosch is the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest extant university in Sub-Sahara ...

, and the

University of Pretoria The University of Pretoria (, ) is a multi-campus public university, public research university in Pretoria, the administrative and ''de facto'' capital of South Africa. The university was established in 1908 as the Pretoria campus of the Johan ...

. The

office was headed by Louis du Plooy until the organisation was disbanded in 1991. The liaison officer was Cleoné Bakker.

References

{{Political history of South Africa , state=expanded Afrikaner organizations Apartheid in South Africa Apartheid government Defunct civic and political organisations in South Africa Organisations associated with apartheid