‘Leisure time’: two young men playing ludo

I first met David Emaru and Robert Econyu in the trading centre of Atine Atirir in 2010. At the time, David and Robert were ludo players, and I met them on a weekday morning when many others were busy in the gardens (I visited the area during the growing season). They were with a group of friends and were sitting in front of one of the verandas that flanked the main road. This was a grass-thatched shade in front of a small shop. A reasonable crowd had gathered, and by the time I arrived there were twelve men either watching or playing the game. At first I was surprised by the openness of the space in which ludo was played (sometimes the police would make the effort to move these groups along). The game was often played for small sums of money, and was always played by younger men. Older men tended to play the traditional game omweso, while both younger and older men played cards.Footnote ⁶ (Ludo was seen as a bit more respectable than card playing, as it was associated with young men who did not drink alcohol.)

The trading centre itself lies parallel to the newly constructed road between Soroti and Lira.Footnote ⁷ There is an old red-soil murram road that used to be the main thoroughfare, and between these old and new roads are a small number of ‘hotels’: mud-walled, thatched structures where a plate of posho (maize porridge) and beans can be bought for 1,000 shillings (US$0.27), or posho and beef stew for 2,000 shillings (US$0.54). The main part of the trading centre lies either side of the old road and is made up of about twenty ‘lockups’ (single-storey structures that can be locked from the front). In front of the shops runs a continuous veranda, and in front of the veranda a number of more temporary structures. At the far end a group of women gather in the late morning and early afternoon selling a few foodstuffs: aubergines, tomatoes, avocados, onions and also small dried fish known as omena or ‘million fish’. This is not a major trading place, and the pace of things is noticeably unhurried when compared with the former regional capital of Soroti, about twelve miles down the road.

The ludo board – the usual board that I remembered from childhood – was reinforced by a high-sided wooden frame. This allowed for the fairly violent throws of the dice, which ricocheted around. The game is played with more style, wit and performance than might be expected. Different players have a certain way with the dice, and the game commands a degree of attention, not only from the players, but also from the audience. The board is divided into four quadrants – red, blue, green, yellow. Each quarter is named after a Premier League football team – Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, in that order, with Arsenal the most popular (Vokes Reference Vokes2010: 10). At the beginning of the game, each player is given four tokens, which are placed on four separate circles in his quadrant. With each roll of the dice the player races his tokens clockwise around the board along a path of squares that are not part of any player's home column. The winner is the one who gets his pieces around the board fastest. As he goes around, others can stop him in his tracks by landing on the same square as one of his pieces, sending that piece back to the start – meaning that there is a back and forth, and an element of combat and strategizing. Ludo, though played for relaxation, was competitive; considerable delight could be had in returning your opponent back to his starting quadrant.

There was a semi-hierarchy to those who got to play, with ‘bigger’ men – those who were married, older or doing better in life – more likely to get a game. Those who could claim to be more pressed for time (schoolteachers on a break, or those with some sort of business to do in the trading centre) would try to get in before others. That said, what was striking was that this was not a particularly hard and fast rule, and people who could claim to be more important would often sit back, wait their turn, or decide to move on. This relates to what historians have termed the acephalous or ‘chiefless’ inheritance of people living in the Teso region, resulting in a similar respect for others, albeit tempered by attributes such as marital status, level of education or age (cf. Vincent Reference Vincent1968; Reference Vincent1982; Lawrance Reference Lawrance1957; Henriques Reference Henriques2002). Ivan Karp, writing of the game elee (a variant of omweso) in the late 1970s, for example, noted something similar where ‘the atmosphere’ of game playing is always one of ‘informality, equality and cheerfulness’ (Reference Karp1978: 55). If there is a particular quality to social relations among men, it is the tendency to socialize with men of a similar age, and the ludo board was almost entirely surrounded by men in their twenties and early thirties, and it was unremarkable to find a former pupil playing with their schoolteacher or a businessman losing out to a farm labourer.

At the time of our first conversation, Robert was still at home with his parents. He was not married and told me that before marriage he wanted to find a proper job, by which he meant salaried employment. He was helping his parents on the farm, and said that he was also trying to get a sponsor for further studies (he saw me as a potential patron). Robert turned up in his farming overalls. He had left Katine Secondary School after completing his A levels a few years earlier. When asked about what he wanted to study, he told me ‘mass communication and journalism’. This seemed to relate to the after-effects of a well-publicized development project that had been running in the area. The NGO had received funding from the Guardian newspaper and had set up a ‘community resource centre’ where people could go to use the internet to find friends and, hopefully, a sponsor for future studies. One of his Facebook friends lived in Canada, and when asked about what he discussed with his Canadian friend, he said, ‘We exchange views on life here, and life there.’ Robert said that he could spend about six hours a week online, although he worried about finding another way of getting access once the NGO stopped its work. When I suggested that he might end up as a farmer, he said that this would be ‘wasting his education’. The money used to play ludo was mostly from day labouring, or ‘borrowed’ from his parents. Spending time in the trading centre – among educated young men – around the ludo board was also the closest thing he had to the experience of being back at school.

David ran a barbering salon in the trading centre. He had a pair of electric clippers and worked out of a small grass-thatched shade, cutting hair for 500 shillings. On a good day David cut the hair of about twenty or so customers and made about 10,000 shillings (US$2.74). His business was started with help from his uncle, also a barber, after David left school in ‘Senior Four’ (the last year of the lower part of secondary school).Footnote ⁸ David had also recently started playing cards, a slight slip in the eyes of some of his peers. David had a family he was supporting in the village. He was married with two children, although he had still to complete the payment of the bride price owed to his wife's family (a common situation in Uganda; see Muthegheki et al. Reference Muthegheki, Crispus and Abrahams2012; Hague et al. Reference Hague, Thiara and Turner2011).Footnote ⁹ An only child, David farmed three plots of land (amisirin) next to his home. He told me he preferred his work in the trading centre as there were more opportunities there. David was also a member of a village savings and loan association, a form of savings group organized around a self-selected group of villagers and a product of NGO work in the area. Members received loans that were valued against the assets – typically livestock – they had. David wore a baseball cap and an Arsenal shirt.

In watching the ludo game play out, I was reminded that this has become a feature of life in trading centres across the region. It was a change from what I had observed during my first stay in the area in 2001. I was also struck by the way in which Robert and David had a relationship, in one way or another, both to education and to farming. Robert, younger and with slightly more years of schooling, helped his parents in the garden, while also hoping for further studies. David, older, with less formal education and with his commitments as a husband and father, saw farming as more of a fixed part of his future. Both puzzled over what to do. The possibility of Facebook friends, watching Arsenal play in one of the video halls, membership of a village savings and loans association and the hoped-for degree in ‘mass communication’ suggested signifiers of a different world. Their lives were also framed by the familiar experience of going to church, of attending burials, of digging.

The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In the next section I offer a brief history of the Teso region as it relates to experiences of education, play and farming.Footnote ¹⁰ In particular, I reflect on the words and practices through which people made sense of time and leisure. After this I discuss the three observations concerning ‘leisure time’ outlined earlier. First, the way in which the space that developed around the ludo board continued the sociality of school and made possible a sense of passing time in the style of the salaried classes. Second, the ways in which this experience of ‘leisure time’ also existed alongside patterns of work – farming, petty trading and casual employment – that were typical for the area. Third, that despite the apparent ‘idleness’ of ‘youths’ in the area, older people were sympathetic to the situation younger men found themselves in. Each of these points complicates a literature on youth in Africa that has mostly focused on the different ways in which young men are ‘stuck’ or failing to move on to ‘social adulthood’, or somehow abandoned by an older generation that experienced life very differently.

Schooling and play in eastern Uganda

The most obvious change in rural Uganda over the past twenty years has been the push for mass education (Meinert Reference Meinert2009; Cheney Reference Cheney2007).Footnote ¹¹ In Katine sub-county, the number of primary schools has gone up from a handful in the 1990s to more than thirty by 2018. As well as primary schools, there are fee-paying secondary schools, both government and private. Parishes typically have their own government primary school, which may be a ‘mango tree’ school made up of temporary structures, or a more finished complex of school buildings and teachers’ houses. There are also ‘community schools’ where there may be a few government-paid teachers alongside teachers whose salary is paid by the parents. In Katine sub-county, Katine Primary School and Katine Secondary School, both down the road from the trading centre, are examples of government schools (where the full roster of teachers is on the Ministry of Education payroll and where the buildings are the responsibility of the District Education Office in Soroti). The popular view is that government primary schools have suffered under this expansion; with classes of more than 100 a common feature of the first few years of schooling, many do not learn to read or write and drop out of school after a few years. For these reasons, David sends his children to a private primary school on the edge of the trading centre (the school fees were 200,000 shillings or US$55 per term).

This expansion of primary education has had a knock-on effect on the numbers going to secondary school and for further studies.Footnote ¹² It is possible to see a sort of ‘diploma disease’, with young men such as Robert responding to the puzzle of education and unemployment by seeking out more education (Dore Reference Dore1976; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984: 142–3). I was also told that ‘you need someone in front to get a job’, and that getting a government job also involved bribes and ‘donations’. At the same time, education was not entirely new, and the longer history of schools in the area informed the way people regarded the current crop of ‘educated’ individuals. Villagers could point to older men who had ‘got an education’, who farmed but who had also drifted in and out of salaried employment, or who had remained ‘in the village’. I was introduced to a man in his fifties with a university degree who did not do much, even in the way of farming, relying instead on his wife. He spent his afternoons sitting and drinking.

The semi-detached relationship between education and jobs in the Teso region has a long history, and Teso is different from many of the other sites in sub-Saharan Africa – mines, plantations, cities – that have offered some of the more eye-catching accounts of under-employment on the continent: sites where wages, salaries and labour migration are part of lived experience and expected futures (cf. Ferguson Reference Ferguson1999; Bolt Reference Bolt2015). The incorporation of the Teso region into the colonial system in the first half of the twentieth century was as a smallholder agricultural economy in which households were expected to grow cotton for onward sale, and where much of the work of buying and selling was managed by Asian traders (Vincent Reference Vincent1968: 182–3; Reference Vincent1982: 154–6). The Iteso – the dominant society in the area – were pushed into this economy (Vincent Reference Vincent1982). Employment was limited to the few individuals who joined the higher levels of the local government system, the army or the police. The only other major organizational structures present in the region during the colonial period – the mission churches and the schools and hospitals they founded – were managed by Europeans until the mid-1970s (Ravalde Reference Ravalde2017: 51). Positions occupied by Africans – lay reader, clerk, catechist – had few prospects and were unwaged, and those who held such positions were expected to continue their agricultural work.Footnote ¹³ Schooling during the colonial and early postcolonial period, I was told, was more about creating a class of ‘gentleman farmers’ who could serve in these part-time roles. The decline of cotton in the postcolonial period – due to the expulsion of Uganda's Asian population in the early 1970s, along with declining global prices – only confirmed a pattern where schooling was combined with smallholder farming, cattle rearing and petty trading (Jones Reference Jones2009).

Of more immediate interest for those turning up to play at the ludo board have been the new forms of consumption that have developed with the spread of mobile phones and satellite broadcasting. Long conversations about Arsenal's prospects in the English Premier League, and the sense that farming might be ‘backward’, suggest a subtle shift in ‘the cultural knowledge and self-making of individuals’ in Atine Atirir (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2009: 83). For many younger men, the English Premier League has moved the high spot of the week from Sunday to Saturday, while car batteries mean that video halls can screen films late into the night most nights of the week. Younger men watched Nollywood and Bollywood films, martial arts movies and porn films. On my most recent visit to the area, two one-arm-bandit machines had been installed by an Indian businessman who had travelled up from the district capital. These new ways of passing time, of which ludo was one, provided the context in which ‘educated’ young men were refashioning older notions of what it was to relax.

For those who went to secondary school, there was a sense of being educated that set them apart from those who ‘dropped out’. This was as much about the particular sociality of schooling as it was about the curriculum or the classroom learning that took place. Students would walk to and from school, in their uniforms, and this opened up time for particular ways of socializing and hanging out. Many of the young men I spoke to also remembered with affection the moments of relaxed, mostly homosocial, ways of spending time with friends in the school grounds or during class. I was also told – with a degree of embarrassment – about the one-line ‘love letters’ that passed from boy to girl under the desk: ‘I will love you ’til Lake Victoria runs dry.’ There was a playfulness mixed in with what it was to get an education. As such, memories of school focused less on the sorts of frustrations that came from lack of salaried work in the present than on the experience of becoming a student, school as a place for socializing, or the sort of identity schooling gave.

‘Leisure time’ was also something read against older phrases and understandings. A particularly popular verb among young men was aibwobwo, which can best be translated as the sense of walking around without an obvious destination: a form of ambling that was nonetheless important as a way of relaxing and for opening up space to think. I was told that aibwobwo was also a space for reflection and for coming to terms with disappointments and frustrations. The practice of ambling along also relates to the experience of earlier generations when men would spend long days away with cattle. Another popular phrase was auriak, which refers to the way a man relaxes in the shade, but also the way in which cattle relax under a tree after grazing. The language of relaxation was deeply gendered (aibwobwo and auriak are phrases that men use about themselves). When I asked the wives of Robert and David what they did to ‘relax’, I was told that women ‘work and sleep’ and that ‘there was no time for relaxing’. Women were able to find their own ways of unwinding – sleeping during a church service, visiting a relative – but this missed out on the language of play.

‘We are passing our leisure time’

For many of the young men around the ludo board, their education marked them out from earlier generations, having been the first in the family to go to school. Playing ludo, and the culture that developed around ‘leisure time’, produced something of the sociality they experienced at school. Spending time with men of a similar age and educational attainment helped continue this ‘educated’ experience, and, as already noted, a couple of those who turned up to play were themselves young schoolteachers from the nearby primary school. The ludo board and the trading centre opened a space where, in the absence of a ‘good job’, it was possible to escape momentarily from ‘the dust and soil of the village’ and be in a place that was reserved ‘for after school, in the afternoon’, a ‘place for relaxing with friends’.

When I asked Robert whether older people might pass judgement on them for the time spent around the ludo board, I was told: ‘Ludo? We just play for our leisure. Some old men might criticize us … but they don't know that we are passing our leisure time here.’

Robert was making the point that ‘leisure time’ was a space that educated younger men had made for themselves, a space that was for passing time, a space that older men could not fully understand.Footnote ¹⁴ Those around the ludo board tended to be those with at least a secondary-school education, and a few of those who sat around the board affected a mixture of rural and urban idioms (they sometimes spoke English and were keen to tell me that they were not ‘full villagers’). Robert's slightly oppositional response – ‘our leisure’, ‘they don't know’ – also reflected how the ludo board could, for some, be a way of fashioning an identity as a would-be student, even while being busy with farming. (Robert hoped to return to his studies and was also aware that I might be a possible sponsor, and he showed me business cards of journalists and NGO workers who had passed through the area.)

Robert was a slightly awkward character; others were more comfortable with ludo as a way to mix their identities as ‘educated’ villagers with the realities of farming and family life. David, like many of his peers, was keen to impress on me that ludo-playing for him was a way of relaxing and of having a convivial time away from the troubles of family and work life. David made less of a fuss about his status as someone who had gone to school, and he elided his experiences of education with his roles as a barber and as a man with a home and a family. The ludo board was not, in practice, as restrictive a space as the would-be student Robert tried to claim. It was a bit of a mixture, with most of those playing educated men in their twenties or early thirties, but also with the odd ‘dropout’ or older man. Mostly, though, the board was notable for being a familiar and comfortable place for those who had experienced the sociality of secondary school or college.

‘Leisure time’ was also interesting for the way it formed part of a nexus with ideas of salaried work. Young men told me about NGO workers relaxing in bars in the district capital, and of the way in which the ‘working class’ of Kampala would meet to watch Premier League games in the best hotels. So ‘leisure time’ could also be thought of as a way of associating yourself with work, even if you did not have a job, and something that gave you the sense – however distant – of being like a salaried worker. This point would seem to take us back to Veblen's observations concerning the ‘leisured class’ and his description of ‘conspicuous leisure’ as defined by its ‘exemption from useful employment’. Ludo players pointed to the way in which NGO workers and government officials drove around in Mitsubishi Pajeros, ‘not really doing anything’, and of the way they could be observed in social spaces – playing the ‘big man’ in church or at a burial, or hanging out in the hotels in the district capital – rather than working. Claiming some sort of connection to ‘leisure time’ was a reminder that relaxing was not only something that could be claimed by the elite; it was also available to those who did not have a salary but who saw themselves as educated and less obviously of the village than their parents.

If we return to Robert's earlier comment about the way the games played around the ludo board were something that had been made ‘here’ for ‘our leisure’, there is also a story about the way in which ‘leisure time’ belonged to the trading centre. This differs from Ivan Karp's description of games in the late 1970s, where players would keep an omweso board at home ‘so that potential followers and friends can come and play’ (Karp Reference Karp1978: 55). For Karp, the game was not only a place to ‘gossip, relax, and play’ but also a place for developing an influential ‘circle of friends’ (he was struck by the fact that omweso was rarely played between close relatives). In Atine Atirir, game playing had shifted from the home to the trading centre and is less easily read as being about a would-be ‘big man’ cultivating potential allies by inviting them to his home to play. Instead, it was possible to see the trading centre as an emerging cultural site that helped educated young men carry over the particular experiences of socializing at school into their subsequent lives.

‘We do our garden work and then we come to play’

David sometimes came to the ludo board wearing muddy boots. His life, like those of his fellow players, continued to be lived in a way that bound him to farming. David continued to cultivate crops, and he and his wife used the three gardens inherited from his father. Farming of the sort David engaged in typically meant working a small amount of land with a focus on crops – groundnuts and sweet potatoes – that could be sold at market. Robert, the high-school student who hoped to do a degree in mass communication, also helped his parents in their gardens and had inherited some plots for himself. The schoolteachers who sometimes turned up to play also went back to the village to farm during the long holidays (and regretted the fact that, as teachers in a private school, they did not have houses or farmland provided for them by the school – part of the package for teachers in government schools). Although some of these men disdained the connection to farming, they were part of a generation that had to make education sit alongside the fact that rural forms of work continued to be a part of the way they made a living (cf. Mwaura Reference Mwaura2017a).

Frustrations focused more on the fact that farming, in and of itself, was not able to provide a good living. Land in the Teso region is divided roughly equally among sons, meaning that there has been an accelerating process of land fragmentation in recent years and a consequent practice of internal migration. Young men who stay in the area have to pursue a number of things to get by.Footnote ¹⁵ Only the richest households in the area could pay labourers to work their land or had the resources to invest in experimenting in commercial farming. This meant that many of the young men around the ludo board not only farmed but also worked as day labourers (typically for between 5,000 and 8,000 shillings – US$1.37–US$2.20). Day labouring might mean digging a neighbour's fields or doing construction work. The most common forms of other work were making bricks for sale and gathering grass for thatching. A number of men had taken to selling roasted pork from sites dotted around the area, away from the trading centre.Footnote ¹⁶ David, who worked as a barber and as a motorbike taxi-man, was one of the better-off men in the area and looked busier, and he was able to elbow his way into a ludo game ahead of others.

In choosing the somewhat different cases of Robert and David, I suggest that there were different ways of approaching the issue of farming, marriage and joblessness in Atine Atirir. Robert, who seemed to be one of the younger men around the ludo board, claimed the status of a would-be student who was helping his parents in their gardens. When I first met him, he was also keen to be seen as an ‘educated youth’ in pursuit of further education, who was ‘staying home’ in the meantime. David, who was a few years older, married and had children, was further down the road to making a living and no longer felt such a connection to his time as a student. He did not see himself as ‘jobless’ (in the sense that he was hoping for future paid employment), nor was he someone who was on furlough before going back for further studies. Instead, he was a barber who had yet to pay off the rest of his bride price and who managed the land he and his wife farmed.

Over the course of a few years, the stories of Robert and David moved forward in ways that complicated the picture. There was a popular and long-held notion among ludo players of the ‘disturbed man’ (ituan yen irimi airim – literally ‘one who cannot settle down’) to capture those who moved between village and town, or who failed to honour their obligations. In different ways, Robert and David moved in and out of this category. Robert, who had fashioned himself as a good student when I first met him in 2011, was, when I last met him, married with children and had developed a reputation as someone who was not particularly responsible. Robert had left the area for a while, claiming to go to town in search of work, and had left behind a daughter who was seriously ill. In his absence, the child was taken to a number of hospitals for treatment with financial help coming from his wife's brother. Robert's wife told me that he had become less and less useful around the home even before he moved away: ‘I go to the garden when my husband is resting in bed … my husband does not help me, it is my fellow women who come and help.’ David was also seen as less and less settled. On my most recent stay in the area, I was told that David did not always stay with his wife and that he had started a second family in the trading centre.

‘Younger people suffer from a lack of work’

There is a general discourse in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa concerning idle ‘youth’ and the problems they pose to society. Press reports, television programmes and the speeches of politicians and church leaders all decry the moral character of Uganda's younger generation and link young men to problems of fraud, trickery and violence. This official discourse also finds expression in scholarly accounts of youth in Uganda and elsewhere (e.g. Namuggala Reference Namuggala2016: 79). Frameworks that ask whether African youth are ‘hooligans or heroes’, ‘heroes or villains’, ‘vanguard or vandals’ or ‘troublemakers or peacemakers’ position youth in opposition to older generations and emphasize a mixture of potential and danger (cf. Resnick and Thurlow Reference Resnick and Thurlow2015). In an introduction to the subject, Deborah Durham writes of the ways in which youth in Africa may be ‘saboteurs’ of the prevailing order (Reference Durham2000). Whyte and Acio, while recognizing that many young men and women continue to farm in Uganda, also point to a general discourse of rural youth unable ‘to face the garden’ and ‘too lazy to pursue agriculture’, and structure their analysis around conflicts and tensions between different generations (Reference Whyte and Acio2017: 22).

What was striking in Atine Atirir was that the sorts of discourses that labelled young men as disruptive or problematic were less pronounced. Scratching beneath the surface of complaints between older and younger villagers, it was possible to find a degree of sympathy and understanding on the part of older people towards the situation of young men. They were not particularly viewed as a site of ‘twenty-first-century instability’, nor were they seen as needing particular disciplining or domination on the part of a more ‘responsible’ older generation (Argenti and Durham Reference Argenti, Durham, Parker and Reid2013: 396). Young men were instead seen as suffering under changes that were not really within their control and, in any case, their older counterparts were dealing with similar problems.

There are a number of reasons for the sort of sympathy that existed between the generations. The first, somewhat prosaic, reason was the fact that sitting and passing time was not the lone preserve of young men. Many others sat around the trading centre and waited out the day. A few metres away from the ludo board sat a number of older women selling aubergines and tomatoes. They came to the trading centre in the late morning, after they had done their garden work. Sales were rare and most of their day was spent sitting and waiting. Even the women and men running the various shops – mostly selling basic foodstuffs, stationery and mobile phone airtime – experienced business at a fairly slow pace, and hours might pass without a sale. Those who came to do a particular activity, such as buying cooking oil, collecting rent or taking a bicycle to be repaired, stopped and took their time. Schoolteachers from the nearby fee-paying secondary school came during their lunch hour and sometimes joined in a game of ludo or borrowed a slightly out-of-date copy of The New Vision or The Monitor to read.Footnote ¹⁷

Older people were also aware of structural problems in the economy – smaller plots to farm, more people, fewer opportunities, indebted marriages. The situation of young men – particularly those just out of school – was more usually explained by the absence of work than by the failure of young men to find salaried employment. The lack of jobs was a situation that young men suffered under rather than one that they themselves were making, and, as we have seen, the link between education and employment had always been tenuous in the region. When I asked a local businessman about whether there was a problem with ‘idlers’, I was told:

The businessman knew that it was difficult for young men with an education to get a job, and also that it was not easy to have a future that relied on farming.

Discussions around unemployment in Atine Atirir had a sociological rather than a pathological quality. Older men who had achieved success in farming or business told me that idleness came about mostly because people had gone for education and could not match their education with work. And while it was understood that many would have to find their way back to farming in the end, it was reasonable to expect that any shift would take time, and might involve a number of reversals. As such, the men playing ludo were not necessarily a general problem; rather, it was individuals such as Robert who took a wrong turn. The intimacy of village life meant that it was not so easy to stereotype younger men as uniformly idle; actions and behaviours varied between individuals and over time. The same young men who sat around the ludo board were also seen (or not seen) at burials, in the gardens or in church.

A final point. In studies of ‘youth’ in Africa and elsewhere, the desire has been to move away from an approach that sees younger men and women as appendages to an older generation. This type of work emerges out of a critical view of earlier accounts of youth on the continent, where young people were mostly ‘cast in a supporting role’ and ‘rarely studied as the central point’ (Durham Reference Durham2000: 114). We see concepts such as ‘youthscapes’, ‘youthmen’ and the category of ‘youth’ itself producing a very different and distinct account of what it is to be younger rather than older, where youth becomes a self-evident category for social analysis (cf. Christiansen et al. Reference Christiansen, Utas and Vigh2006). As Whyte and Acio point out, ‘youth in Africa have been the subject of intense study in recent years’, and they go on to mention the different ways in which youths have been categorized – ‘urban youth, militarized youth, unemployed youth, sexually active youth, culturally creative youth’ – before adding their description of ‘rural youth’ (Whyte and Acio Reference Whyte and Acio2017: 18). And yet it is worth asking ourselves whether this push to make young people the ‘central point’ produces too much of an oppositional and difference-making view of the experiences of people of different ages. In Atine Atirir, I have found the word ‘youth’ much less helpful than the terms ‘younger men’ or ‘younger people’. In the trading centre, part of the sympathy of older generations for younger men, for example, came from an understanding that things were different, but not that different.