Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood Social Becoming in an African Context

Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood Social Becoming in an African Context Edited by Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh NORDISKA AFRIKAINSTITUTET, UPPSALA 2006 © The Nordic Africa Institute Indexing terms: Youth Adolescents Children Social environment Living conditions Human relations Social and cultural anthropology Case studies Africa Language checking: Elaine Almén Cover photo: “Sierra Leonean musician 2 Jay” by Mats Utas ISBN 91-7106-578-4 © the authors and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet 2006 Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab AB, Stockholm 2006 © The Nordic Africa Institute Contents YOUTH(E)SCAPES Introduction Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh ……………………………………… 9 NAVIGATIng YOUTH Chapter 1. Social Death and Violent Life Chances Henrik E. Vigh ……………………………………………… 31 Chapter 2. Coping with Unpredictability: “Preparing for life” in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon Trond Waage …………………………………………………… 61 Chapter 3. Child Migrants in Transit: Strategies to assert new identities in rural Burkina Faso Dorthe Thorsen ………..……………………………………… 88 GEN(D)ERATIng ADULTHOOD Chapter 4. Popular Music and Luo Youth in Western Kenya: Ambiguities of modernity, morality and gender relations in the era of AIDS Ruth Prince …………...………………………………………… 117 Chapter 5. Industrial Labour, Marital Strategy and Changing Livelihood Trajectories among Young Women in Lesotho Christian Boehm …………………………………………… 153 Chapter 6. Relocation of Children: Fosterage and child death in Biombo, Guinea-Bissau Jónína Einarsdóttir ………………………………………… 183 © The Nordic Africa Institute IncLUSION / EXCLUSION Chapter 7. Meaningful Rebels? Young adult perceptions on the Lord’s Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda Sverker Finnström ………………………………………… 203 Chapter 8. The Serendipity of Rebellious Politics: Inclusion and exclusion in a Togolese town Nadia Lovell …………………………........…………………… 228 AFTERWORD Michael A. Whyte …………………………………………… 255 CONTRIBUTORS ………………………………………………………………… 267 INDEX ………………………………………………………………… 269 © The Nordic Africa Institute Acknowledgements This book is the result of the Nordic workshop on researching children and youth in Africa that we organised at the Nordic Africa Institute in May 2004. The workshop aimed at gath- ering scholars from the social sciences who are active in the Nordic countries and who carry out research on children and youth in Africa. 25 scholars, symptomatically many of them young and upcoming, presented papers during the three-day workshop in Uppsala and new, fresh, perspectives on children and youth emerged. The conference was funded by the Nordic Africa Institute, and we are in particular grateful to Lennart Wohlgemuth who, when the number of participants exceeded expectations, responded swiftly by allocating ad- ditional funding. We also wish to thank Karolina Winbo who administered the event in such an effective and pleasant way. We would like to dedicate this volume to Björn Lind- gren, workshop participant and colleague at the Nordic Africa Institute, who after a short period of illness passed away in November 2004. His warmth and positive atti- tude will not be forgotten. Freetown and Copenhagen, March 2006 Mats Utas, Henrik E. Vigh and Catrine Christiansen 5 © The Nordic Africa Institute 6 © The Nordic Africa Institute Y OUT H( E ) S C APES © The Nordic Africa Institute 8 © The Nordic Africa Institute — I N TRODU C TIO N — Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh This book is about contemporary African youth. It is about a generation of people who have been born into social environments in which their possibilities of living decent lives are negligible and in which many have found themselves stuck in positions of inadequate life chances and bleak prospects (Dahrendorf 1979), in ‘youthscapes’ (cf. Maira and Soep 2004) built on and saturated by prolonged processes of destruction, disease and decline. Since the early 1970s many African youths have aspired to come of age in often volatile and precarious circumstances and have had to shape their lives and strategies accordingly in their attempt to generate meaningful lives for themselves. One of the primary goals of this book is to present a handful of detailed ethnographic descriptions of these ‘youthscapes’ in order to further our knowledge of the social possibilities, experiences and fantasies of youth in Africa. Building on extensive fieldwork with children and youth in Africa all the contributions to the book demonstrate how the extended case meth- od is able to illustrate and analyse both young people’s daily life and dreams as well as the social, economic and political environments they are set in. However, although in vogue, the pictures that the metaphor of ‘scapes’ con- veys – as a solid surface of enactment – do not always fit the often volatile or fluid political structurations, communities and societies within which we are researching youth on the African continent. The bracketed E‘ ’ in the title of this introductory chapter thus hints at the second primary focus of the book, namely the way that young people move and shape the social environments in which their lives are set. It refers to the way young people in Africa reconfigure “geographies of exclusion and inclusion” (De Boeck and Honwana 2005:1), the way they seek to escape confining structures and navigate economic, social and political turmoil (Vigh 2003; 2006). 9 © The Nordic Africa Institute Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh Context and constitution A look back at on this century’s last few decades makes it clear that old age was “discovered” only in recent years (…) it certainly demanded some redefinition when an ever-increasing number of old people were found (and found themselves) to represent a mass of elderlies rather than an elite off elders. Before that, however, we had come at last to acknowledge adulthood as a developmental and conflictual phase in its own right, rather than merely the mature end of all development (…) before that (and then only in the sixties, a period of national identity crisis dramatically reflected in the public behaviour of our youth), we had learned to pay full attention to the adolescent identity crisis as central to the developmental dynamics of the life cycle (Erikson 1959). And as pointed out, it had not been before the mid-century that the child’s “healthy personality” and all the infantile stages discovered only in this century really became the centre of systematic national attention. (Erikson 1994:9) Erikson’s quote above begs the question: ‘What kind of socio-generational category will become dominant next?’ Contrary to his intention to describe the revealing of innate psycho-social stages of development the quote di- rects our attention to the fact that youth – and generational categories in general – are brought to the fore not necessarily only by psychological or biological processes but rather by the specific circumstances that generate and emphasise one generational category over another. Though all too many anthropological, sociological and psychological studies have granted the concept of youth an a priori meaning, seeing it as a developmental or life stage, the transition from childhood to adulthood should not be considered fixed and stable. Generational categories will for most of us – layman and researcher alike – seem self-evident, but rather than being given naturally their meanings and manifestations arise in relation to specific social processes, cultural understandings and histori- cal influences (cf. Mannheim 1952). Youth is differently constituted and configured in different times and places. It may be an influential social category in one context, a marginal one in another and obsolete in a third. Neither its existence nor meaning should be taken for granted (Bucholtz 2002:525–528, Waage, this volume: chapter 2). Rather than pointing our attention to generational categories, such as youth, as cross-cultural univer- sals, the different chapters within this book illuminate that such concepts and categories are dynamic and contested. The chapters show that these concepts are not naturally given but fraught with dificulties. 10 © The Nordic Africa Institute Introduction Being and becoming Theoretically our point of departure is that we must understand the constitution and dynamics of youth by positioning it within the social contexts and situations that it is actualised in. People are not passively part of a socio-generational category. Though they may be ascribed a generational position, they seek to inhabit, escape or move within this in meaningful ways. In similar vein, this book focuses on the lives and experiences of young people in Africa – on agents who, willingly or unwillingly, see themselves as belonging to the socio-generational category in question, and the ways in which they seek to shape and unfold their lives in a positive manner. Instead of approaching the concept of youth as either a social or cultural entity in itself, or as a rigid developmental life-stage, our view is that we must investigate both how youth position themselves and are positioned within generational categories if we wish to do the topic justice. In studying young people we must, in other words, see youth as both social being and social becoming: as a position in movement (Vigh 2003; 2006). Youth is both a social position which is internally and externally shaped and constructed, as well as part of a larger societal and generational process, a state of becoming. We need thus to look

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