The allegory of the Cave, Youth-ness, Producing, Projecting and Creation: A Walk with Plato

Abstract

This paper will attempt to discuss the concept of ‘youth-ness’, producing, projecting, and
creation from the perspective of Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic. To do this, the
paper will define “youth-ness” and attempt explaining this concept alongside producing,
projecting and creation/creating. Youth development and youth participation begun in West
Africa during the independence struggles in the region – Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria are key
countries that relied heavily on their “youths” to gain their independence. Siaka Stevens,
Wallace Johnson, Kwame Nkrumah, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nnamdi Azikiwe were the faces
and voices of the young people pre-independence in the region. After independence, there were
calls to involve the “young” people who helped their nation-states to gain independence in the
governance of these new states. Many young and largely politically and generally
inexperienced youth were co-opted into governance at various levels of government. Youth is
a complex phenomenon in most of Africa, it defies definition as the notion of ‘youth’ is
presented as a phrase or sentence, rather than a word in any ethnic African language more so
in Sierra Leonean languages. Youth is a triad of ‘development’ speak, politics and
culture/tradition, hence as a phenomenon that we build policy around, we cannot focus on just
one of the triads; it is necessary to weave the strings of the different ‘phenomenologies’ of
‘youth’ together with the policy actions we seek to take in order to produce the outcomes we
want.
Keywords: Sierra Leone, Youth-ness, Plato’s allegory of the cave, The Republic