‘Teachers expect parents to teach you. Parents expect teachers to teach you. So actually you learn nothing and nobody wants to talk about it’. This quote from this research study is an adolescent girls’ cry for liberation from the silence related to sexuality because of the general reluctance of adults to talk to them about it. Given the growing concerns raised about the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents in South Africa, the aim of this study was to conduct research with adolescent girls as subjects in order for girls’ voices to enhance adult researchers’ understanding of children’s need for support and guidance in the context of sexuality education. The purposively selected sample included 75 participants from three diverse high schools in the Western Cape. The research was conducted using a phenomenological approach that values the lived experiences of participants as significant in contributing to the knowledge on adolescent sexuality. A qualitative interpretative research design was applied to collect the data. This article argues that adults cannot help adolescents in their sexual emancipation – to be free – if they themselves are not free. If they were free, they would have been able and willing to engage with adolescents in every aspect, which includes their sexuality. Including adolescent girls as partners in transforming sexuality education is presented as a core principle for the sexual emancipation of both adolescent girls and adults.

As part of the theological task of developing a publicly oriented ministry that will do justice to the social plight of children in Africa, this article adopted as its point of departure an appreciation of the new ‘hermeneutics of listening’ that is advanced today by an interdisciplinary movement of scholars from the disciplines of practical theology, theological ethics and religion studies. Emphasising the fact that this new hermeneutics is by and large the result of this scholarly movement’s newly-found engagement with, and exposure to, the social science field of childhood studies, the article moved from a more general appreciation of the new hermeneutical line of thinking to a more pertinent evaluation of the unfolding of this line of thinking in the scholarly context of Africa. In a further development that narrows the African focus to South Africa, the results from a recent empirical investigation amongst members of the South African practical theological academy were discussed in particular to determine the extent of this group’s shift to the new line of thinking. This led the article to make a concluding statement, in the light of its overt practical theological interest, about the way in which the new ‘hermeneutics of listening’ to children could still be seen as an important ongoing challenge, not only for practical theological scholarship in South Africa but also within the larger context of Africa.

In the first part of this article, Africanity as a concept within research methodology is exploredin the dialogical spaces between the binaries of racial identity and group identity, indigenousand traditional values, post-colonialism and post-racialism, blackness and African, as well aseliminativist and conservationalist. In the second part, the research carried out in twotownships in the eMakhazeni Local Municipality in Mpumalanga, South Africa’s most easternprovince, is described in terms of parameters and process. The townships involved areSakhelwe in Dullstroom-Emnotweni and Emthonjeni in Machadodorp-eNktokozweni. Theresearch focuses on interviews with young people between the ages of 18 and 24 on thepotential of faith-based organisations to assist them in moving from the ’margins‘ of society topositions of social cohesion. The third and main part of the article, is dedicated to lessonslearnt and experience acquired when research is carried out in a rural area from an Africanityperspective. This entails, inter alia (1) to be sensitive towards power relations in research; (2)respecting indigenous values within group identities; (3) not predefining the youth, usingindigenous (and not European) definitions of ‘agency’ and ‘marginalisation’; (4) to engage inobservation rather than interpretation; and (5) to decolonise the research process whenregarding interpretation as an act of colonisation.

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