We pull the car up nose to nose with a whole, dead pig, so freshly slaughtered its blood is still running off the curb and into the gutter. Two men sit shaving the pig with Gillette razor blades (“not what the brand probably expected to be used for” comments Darrel from The CIA, whose research fieldwork – for Livity Africa – I am tagging along on). We head straight for the pig-shavers and Darrel asks them how much the beast cost. R800 (about £80) they tell him, live, from Phillippi, another township a few miles away. We start guestimating the number of pork cuts you could sell and the possible yield this animal will make. It’s Saturday morning in Harare, Khayelitsha, and people are getting busy making a living.

Meat figures heavily in “Loxion” (slang for township, from “location”) life, as anyone who has driven through these parts would testify. Barrels full of sheep’s heads, tables stacked with offal, chickens stuffed into buckets, their legs sticking up in the air. On the way here we’d had a conversation about why more people in Khayelitsha (which on one side runs along the coast) don’t eat more fish. Felicity, my hostess for the past 24 hours of ‘immersion’, and also researcher for the CIA, has the simplest of explanations: she rubs her belly and groans about fish not being filling enough…

Once we’ve finished inspecting the pig we head into a blue-painted, corrugated iron, two-roomed home: midway between a shack and a small bungalow, but kept pristinely, with certificates on bookshelves, a TV, telephone, and benches. We’re meeting a group of young people from the area to talk to them on camera about their experiences since leaving high school.

During the interviews two more pigs are slaughtered right outside the window, with some amused glances from the interviewees as the doomed animals squeal for mercy. Among this group of young black South Africans, mostly in their early twenties, not one has a job, or much of an idea where to get one. It’s been a familiar tale told by around 20 young people like this that we’ve met over the last 24 hours: starting at Mzoli’s in Guguletu (often referred to as Gugs, neighbouring suburbs called Surrey and Barcelona) at 6pm on Friday night, with an overnight stay in Mxenge (which to my shame, I can’t get close to pronouncing, having yet to properly master the Xhosa ‘click’), part of the Phillippi township, before we came to Khayelitsha (via Mfuleme, to pick up Sidney, our fixer) this morning.

Without pre-empting the findings of the research (due to be completed early July), it’s clear that these young people are something of a lost generation.  Their stories echo from home to home: the same issues and frustrations. Most of these kids say they do nothing except hang around the townships each and every day, hoping to muster enough money to print off some CVs to fire off into the ether.

The first girl we meet comes bustling up  to shake our hands; bubbly, confident, articulate, smartly dressed. She reminds me of one of the trainee graphic designers I worked with in London. She hasn’t worked for three years. Last week she found herself, during a rare job interview, being asked to put on high heels and to show her legs. Unsure of what they were getting into, her and her friend bolted. The whole room breaks into howls of laughter at this story, led by the girl herself. “I have to laugh”, she says, “because it’s the only way to deal with the stress”, and as the laughter fizzles out, she has to leave the room, wiping a different kind of tears away.

These young people aren’t drop-outs. They all finished school with their Matric (equivalent of A-levels). But Matric is not enough: a hollow victory, even if it means that they’re more highly educated than many of their parents. They feel the government promised them jobs but delivered nothing. Their parents can’t afford to put them through college or uni. They don’t have any experience. They mainly don’t have skills enough to use the internet. To them, it seems almost all the doors are shut, if they can find where the doors are in the first place. I’m trying to understand how we can help find and kick down some of these doors.

And I hope the complex set of reasons why this generation is suffering such a barren landscape of (un)employability, and the interventions we are looking to develop to try and address some of these issues, will follow from this research and my other scoping work. But aside from obsessing over the dynamics of the issue, what slaps me in the face today is the frustration, disillusionment, worthlessness, and hopelessness these kids feel. It’s lurking there, just under the surface. They talk of how they struggle to stay motivated. In one conversation the previous evening, Felicity disarmed a wide-looking guy at Mzoli’s by asking him how staying at home every day made him feel. For a moment he struggled to find the words, but then, quite candidly, said he felt he was letting everyone down.

Later that evening I spoke to another young guy who had worked successfully as a chef, until he got so frustrated at being the only member of the staff who didn’t have a contract or any of the rights that go with it, that he walked out. He then fell in with the wrong crowd and started burgling shacks. Guns were involved. One or two incidents happened. For a country so paranoid about home security, this kid’s past was the epitomy of every good citizen’s nightmare; one of the feared Bogeymen that scares the tourists and makes people spend fortunes on panic buttons and security gates.

We talked long into the night, as the beer turned into whisky and water, and back to beer again. House music blared constantly, and was still thudding gently away when I woke up, late, the next morning. The only time it stopped was for Andile, the father of the house, to make a small speech thanking me for coming to his house, and for the occasion it had become (drinks, braai, neighbours all included). I stood up and, inevitably, did a very British bashful, thank you to Andile and his family for welcoming me into their house. But talking to the boy who had fell into crime again straight afterwards, I realised that this hadn’t been a one-way process, that the sharing of these young people’s stories had been a rare moment for them to release some of these feelings. It’s hard to have an open discussion about it with family, I was told, because of the sense of shame and failure. “It was good to talk about all this,” he told me, “I haven’t done this with anyone.”

This morning’s session runs on for two hours, and we’re late leaving. We have to pass on the second group Sidney had arranged, but we check in with them briefly to apologise and rearrange, drifting into an area deeper into Khayelitsha where the roads get narrower, the shacks more basic and the unnamed dogs mangier and scarier. A cockroach taxi (battered saloon cars, so named because you find them they’re everywhere, and they crawl up onto kerbs to overtake) overtakes us. Kids run up to the car shouting “Mlungu” (‘white person’) at me and Darrel.

I hate to admit it but by this point I’d had enough. Not of the townships, but of hearing the stories of young people who seem so very lost. When I wrote the research brief, one of the first things I asked the CIA to probe was what young people’s aspirations were. When Darrel asked that question this morning to the girl who had broken down in tears, she said: “my dream is to afford life.”

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