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Resilience, or adaptive behavior in the face of adversity, has recently come to be understood as a phenomenon that should not be uniformly conceptualized across contexts and cultures. This emerging understanding has urged exploration of what resilience might mean in specific cultural contexts. As in other majority nation contexts, there is scant documentation of what resilience might mean in an African context. In this article, the authors report on an exploratory qualitative study, rooted in a constructivist grounded theory approach, in which 11 South African adults from an impoverished rural area were invited to provide a description of resilient Basotho youth. In contrast to Eurocentric perspectives, their descriptions, verbal, written, and hand-drawn, offer an Africentric understanding of resilience. This emerging African conceptualization of resilience advocates for deeper exploration of collectivist philosophies underpinning Black youth resilience and continued research into the process of African resilience.

The phenomenon of resilience among street children as a group of at-risk youth goes unnoticed, since they are not typically regarded as resilient. Street children are mostly categorised as vulnerable youth who need care and support, and this deficit view ignores the assets and resources that enable them towards resilience. Nevertheless, street children are remarkably resilient. Using a qualitative approach (semi-structured and focus group interviews), we explore the hidden resilience of 20 street youths in the Free State and Gauteng. The findings transform the popular conceptualisation of street youth as vulnerable and, instead, paint a picture of young people who negotiate resilient trajectories, strengthened in part by personal resources (that are typically unconventional), bonds to their peer groups, and religiosity, to cope resiliency with the multiple challenges of streetism.

Machenjedze, N., Malindi, M. J., & Mbengo, F. (2019). The feasibility of the draw-and-write technique in exploring the resilience of children orphaned by AIDS. African Journal of AIDS Research, 18(1), 72-80. Available here.