The conundrum of discourses on youth: Knowledge, power and state responses to The Ducktail Subculture in the 1950s

Abstract

The Ducktails were a white youth gang subculture, which emerged within post Second World War South Africa. They were rebellious, hedonistic, apolitical and displayed little respect for the law, education or work. There were different levels of belonging in the subculture, which took diffuse and distilled forms and which could at times become conflated. For some, the Ducktail era was characterised by knuckle-dusters and bicycle chains, quiffs and Brylcreem, bioscopes and sessions, confrontations with the police and petty-crime, whilst for others it represented weekend jolls, rock 'n roll and jiving, and 'stove-pipe' trousers and 'fifty-yard' petticoats. For the majority of Ducktails however it was a fashion movement. The latter group of ducktails did not present a real danger to 'conventional' society and engaged predominantly with the stylistic elements of the subculture. The former group ignited very real concerns and fears in public opinion due to their aggressive and violent behaviour, which was attached to the subculture as a whole. State responses to the subculture's identity was largely founded on specious information such as distortions, rumours, and stereotypes expressed on three intenelated yet different discursive platforms: government commissions, academic texts and the press. The result was the generation of a moral panic that demonised the movement branding it as - amongst other things - the 'eendstert euwel'. Through this process 'juvenile delinquenc' became a metaphor for exploring wider social concerns such as the family, child rearing, parenting, working mothers, marriage, entertainment and the state of the nation. The intenelated discourses (racial, patriarchal and religious) moral guardians relied on for their understanding of 'delinquency' were entangled in a web of an 'enveloping discourse, a grand murmure' on morality that intersected with hegemonic ideologies of apartheid. The effect of the discourses was the formulation of what the government wanted the white populace to be, namely conformist, nationalistic, law-abiding citizens who valued morality, Christianity and the belief in white supremacy. This paper hopes to explore ways of understanding and measuring the impact that distortions, rumours and suspicions have on the production of knowledge that is later utilised for designing state policies.