Since the end of the 1990s, an increasing number of publications and conferences have dealt with the question of children and youth in postcolonial Africa. What is significant in current anthropological studies of youth is the rejection of teleological perspectives focusing on the transition from adolescence to adulthood, which in turn implied a very static view of the societies into which children and youth were supposedly ‘socialised’. This volume, however, transcends such narrow concerns, as well as a recent tendency to view ‘youth cultures’ in isolation from social contexts, in its quest for analytical tools suitable for the challenging and often disturbing social and political transformations taking place in contemporary Africa. The twelve chapters, mostly written by anthropologists with a few historians, amply illustrate how children and youth are central and active in effecting these transformations, while simultaneously being deeply affected by them. This is an important volume which in view of its complexity and level of ambition deserves to reach a wide readership.
After an introduction which sets the stage for the individual chapters by describing contemporary African societies as unable to provide credible futures and directions for its young, whether through colonial or postcolonial frameworks, the first of four sections, consisting of a chapter by the Comaroffs, traces the historical trajectory of the notion of youth as a category in and for itself in African modernities. They articulate the ambivalent and ‘bipolar’ predicament of youth in this era of ‘millennial capitalism’ as one of exploitation and exclusion, coexisting with creativity, hope and empowerment.
Delving straight into this stark reality of pain and agency, the next section presents four ethnographies that poignantly capture the ambivalent experiences of young people and children enmeshed in difficult circumstances. While the chapters by Honwana and Utas critique the designation of victimhood to children and young women in war, who are frequently presented as devoid of social agency in both popular and scholarly accounts of such situations in Africa, Reynolds' and Weiss' contributions probe deep into the cultural specificity of pain experienced by children in southern Africa, and youth hanging out in barber shops in Tanzania. They account for the subtle ways in which pain is expressed, recognised and even utilised as an active component in an emerging political consciousness.
The political potential of excluded categories is also followed through in the third section, in which Argenti and Durham explore how young people and women, by performing in seemingly marginal choirs and masquerade dances, appropriate political subjectivities that challenge received social and political orders. Through dramatising the unstable lived realities of the margins, these cultural performances take on subversive meanings that threaten to undermine (modernist) conventions of culture, heritage, ethnicity and liberal versions of personhood espoused by the political establishment.
But it is with the attempt of the last four chapters to go beyond the framework of the postcolonial that the volume breaks new conceptual ground for Africanist scholarship. Addressing an acute sense of disconnection and emancipation, in the face of crushing socioeconomic conditions and intensifying globalisation in African cities, from both modernist and traditionalist forms of political discourse (Abdullah), legitimacy (Diouf), and identity formation (Biaya), the authors illustrate radically novel ways of self-assertion among the African young. Often expressed through violent or illegal means, the forging of a ‘syncinesic identity’, in Biaya's terms, is characterised by practices, aesthetics, and socialities that demonstrate a severe rupture with both colonial and postcolonial precedents. One example is provided by Abdullah's analysis of the socio-historical origins of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Another striking illustration is De Boeck's chapter on Kinshasa, where the transformations of kinship, gender, and exchange relations are articulated into increasing vulnerability of women, youth and children to accusations of witchcraft. In conjunction with such expressions of deep social crisis, the violent imaginary of the second world, now disconnected from the real and the symbolical, is unleashed on to the streets of Kinshasa.
The volume not only brings fresh insights into the predicaments of African children and youth, but also proceeds to address their place in a larger and more radical societal transformation, which in its nature is challenging received knowledge about African realities. Dealing with this epistemological rupture has indeed enabled these scholars to make theoretical advances that will prove useful to future research in and of Africa.
