The study of generation and youth in Africa, as the editors to this volume note, has had its ebbs and flows. With a deep history in African studies (particularly in anthropology), as well as a relative slump in the 1970s and ‘80s, it has re-emerged in the past decade and a half as a burgeoning subfield across the disciplines. This being so, it is somewhat surprising that more collections devoted explicitly to the history of youth in Africa have not to date appeared. Despite the regional and temporal limits to its scope (East Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Burton and Charton-Bigot's volume is the first to do so within the discipline of history. Born out of a 2006 conference, Generations Past brings together some of the leading scholars of youth in East Africa, both junior and senior, in a varied and nuanced collection of essays.

The volume opens with an introductory piece by Burton and G. Thomas Burgess that works both to situate the collection thematically within a broader, Africa-wide field and to present an overview of the trajectories of youth over the past century or so in East Africa. In both tasks the authors are largely successful, displaying impressive nuance and care in presenting a compelling case for generation as a key factor in contemporary and historical crisis, while avoiding the temptation to view youth as perpetual agents of rupture and epochal change. With so much attention in the contemporary moment on the often violent effects accompanying the intersection of a demographic ‘youth bulge’ and the weakening (to the point of collapse in some cases) of a certain form of the late-colonial and early-postcolonial state, these concerns hover over the introduction. And yet, in bringing to bear a perspective informed by histories of East Africa, where the pairing of youth and violence in images of contemporary politics are perhaps less iconic than some other sites on the continent, Burgess and Burton are able to steer clear of a simple version of a youth crisis narrative. To take one example, they on the one hand develop a persuasive argument that, given the relationship between the pressures on the fulfillment of (male) youth aspirations and post-Cold War political crisis, ‘the crisis of the postcolonial state is at least partly a crisis of the process of maturation, particularly for males’ (p. 3). They also, however, caution that the dynamics fuelling this ‘crisis’ stretch back to the precolonial period, thus softening the oft-perceived newness of these conditions and calling for a subtle, rigorously historicized approach to the fortunes of youth across epochal divides.

The volume's twelve essays span a fairly wide range of empirical foci, from past and present male traditions of cattle raiding and warfare (Richard Reid, Dave Eaton, and Richard Waller); through the emergent fortunes of key categories of colonial youth like early African evangelists (James Giblin), elite secondary school students (Charton-Bigot), and the urban jobless (Burton); to attempts by early postcolonial states to harness youth as a political tool (James Brennan and Burgess) and more contemporary young people's negotiation of discourses and experiences of alcohol consumption (Justin Willis), sexuality (Shane Doyle), and HIV-AIDS (Joyce Nyairo and Eunice Kamaara). The editors arrange these essays in more-or-less chronological fashion, identifying two key themes running through the pieces: the repeated claims of youth ‘degeneration’ that recur over the course of the twentieth century, particularly at moments of crisis, and the long history of attempts – both successful and not – by more powerful, older men to harness the bodies and labour of their juniors.

These themes do indeed reappear repeatedly through the collection, albeit in different guises according to historical moment and geographic context. However, in some ways the most interesting push-and-pull of the volume in analytical and theoretical terms runs beneath and across these empirical themes. Two fault-lines are particularly crucial in this regard and help the book stage some of the analytical dilemmas of recent work on youth in Africa. The first continues the (sometimes challenging) effort to highlight both moments of real disjuncture – new categories, vocabularies, and practices of youth coming into being at key moments of historical change – and the deep continuities that run through such shifts and belie easy notions of rupture. Most of the volume's authors pay heed to both poles of this analytical see-saw, while giving somewhat more emphasis to one side or the other in the way they work through their own material. Giblin, in his subtle reading of untapped accounts of the ways Tanzanian missionary assistants drew on preexisting ‘moral economies of affection’ as they negotiated the early colonial moment, shows a special balance in this regard.

The second productive tension running through the volume concerns the imperative, alluded to by Burgess and Burton in their introduction, to consider ‘youth’ as both a discursive category with a shifting history of its own, and an analytical tool that references on-the-ground, extra-discursive social phenomena. Most of the contributors pay some heed to this doubled conception of ‘youth’, with some (such as Brennan on ‘managed vigilantism’ in Tanzania) attending to the ways the shifting discursive character of youth contributes to its social form. Carol Summers's essay on generational metaphors of political change in late-colonial Buganda is unique in the volume in taking a focus on the discursive life of ‘youth’ to an even more challenging conclusion: calling into question the value of youth as an analytic category. Rather, she suggests that the diffuse heterogeneity of conceptions of youth in circulation in mid-twentieth century Buganda should encourage scholars to conceptualize the history of youth as an intellectual and cultural history, rather than a description of what youth did.

That Burton and Charton-Bigot allow the fault-lines of the book to play themselves out across its chapters is a clear sign of the volume's strength. Of course, the collection is not without its weaknesses (relative lack of pre-twentieth century material and work on female youth, for instance), but Generations Past constitutes a thoughtful and sophisticated snapshot of a thriving subfield that will inform work on youth across the continent.