
© Council
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2011
(ISSN 0850-3907)
Introduction: Ideologies of Youth
Rijk van Dijk* Mirjam de Bruijn**
Carlos Cardoso*** & Inge Butter****
Abstract
In a number
of countries in Africa, such as Uganda and Kenya, national publics have been
discussing whether citizens of age 50 or even 60 should be regarded as ‘youth’.
Under the current dispensation of donor funding, relief programmes and international
aid, these discussions have made the ‘youth’ the major beneficiary of what
these policies offer and imply. There is a general feeling, however, that these
policies should target all age groups in their youth-oriented programmes. If
the donorideology prescribes youthfulness for societal and developmental
relevance, it will then dictate practice. This is just one example of what this
special issue will address in an attempt to explore what we see as an emerging
development in Africa and beyond: the rise of youth as an ideology. Whereas Africa has witnessed the rise of a
fast-growing study of youth as a phenomenon
and as a concept, the aspect of youth
as ideology has, so far, not been elaborated on.
Résumé
Les citoyens
dans plusieurs pays africains tels que l’Uganda et le Kenya discutent si oui ou
non ceux qui sont âgés de 50 ou 60 ans doivent être considérés comme faisant
partie de la ‘jeunesse’. Les ‘jeunes’ sont les principaux bénéficiaires du
programme actuel des bailleurs de fonds et de l’aide internationale. Cependant,
d’aucuns défendent de plus en plus le fait que ces politiques doivent cibler
toutes les tranches d’âge. Si l’idéologie des donateurs est de prescrire la
‘jeunesse’ pour justifier la pertinence du développement des sociétés, alors
nous assistons à un dictat de leur part. Ceci n’est qu’un échantillon des
questions que

* African
Studies Centre, Leiden. Email: dijkr@ascleiden.nl ** African Studies Centre,
Leiden University. Email:bruijnmede@ascleiden.nl
*** Council
for the Development of Social Science
Research in Africa, Dakar.
Email:
carlos.cardoso@codesria.sn
****
African Studies Centre, Leiden. Email: butteric@ascleiden.nl
2
cette
édition spéciale tente d’explorer. Ce phénomène est identifié comme étant l’émergence
l’idéologie de la jeunesse, et est de
plus en plus remarqué en Afrique et ailleurs. Même si l’Afrique a connu une
croissance très nette de sa jeunesse comme un phénomène et un concept,
l’aspect de l’idéologie de la jeunesse
n’a pas encore été élaboré.
Introduction
Youth has been approached, first of all, as phenomenon due to the empirical
realities of population growth and the skewed generational composition of many
societies whereby the youth, however defined, are by far in the majority
(Trudell 2002). The precarious situation of youth in many societies, resulting
from poverty, ill-health, lack of education and future prospects, makes youth
the subject of a growing research interest. Hence, a great deal of attention is
devoted to the question of youth not only at
risk, but also as risk. In that
regard, youth is seen as a liability and as a force society should harness
(see, for instance, Sommers 2003, 2006a, 2006b). The youth-asrisk perspective
presents itself in the person of the child-soldier, the gang member, the
religious radical, the hooligan or the criminal (see, for instance, Honwana
2006; Vigh 2006; Lindegaard 2009).
Within this paradigm of the relation between youth and
risk, instigated by the sheer size of the problem, an aid-industry has come to
fruition. In its many NGO activities and initiatives, this aid-industry
apparently has shifted policy-orientations from the ‘rural’, the ‘women’ or the
‘household’, to the ‘youth’ as the new developmental target and hope for the
future (see Garcia and Fares 2008). In some contexts, these NGO activities and
their influence on local politics have influenced the manner in which the youth
came to be recognised as a category for interventions (Durham 2007, Bourdillon
2008). As a social shifter, ‘youth’ is in existence endlessly; there will
always be new youth to target as older youth supposedly move into adulthood at
one point in time (Durham 2000). There can never really be a shortage of young
populations as target of policy initiatives.
The academia in and of Africa have been involved in
exploring and defining the phenomenon of youth. The growth in published works
mirrors the invention of the phenomenon as such. Many of these publications
demonstrate the history of the phenomenon of youth, its invention in colonial
and sometimes even pre-colonial Africa (Abbink and van Kessel 2005; Last 2005;
Honwana and de Boeck 2005). These studies have also particularly contributed to
the ways in which youth came to be recognised as a distinguishable group in
society, marked by its own problems and tribulations. This is evidenced by the
plethora of studies that devote detailed attention to the ‘vulnerability’ of
3
the category under study and produce an
undeniable record of the youth’s precarious condition (Trudell 2002).
The linkage between youth and vulnerability (i.e. youth at
risk) has been studied in many divergent directions, each of them of great
significance in understanding how complex this situation of vulnerability
actually is (i.e. youth and violence, war, soldiers, rebels, crime,
radicalisation).
Increasingly, studies of youth in Africa discovered how
youth themselves have been voicing their vulnerability to poverty, violence
(Jourdan, this volume; Sanni, this volume), AIDS (see Christiansen, this
volume) and inequality through such means of expression as rap, gangster music
and art, or through their self-organisation in various social or religious
movements (see Weiss 2005, 2009; Perullo 2005; Pype 2007; van Dijk 1999; de
Bruijn 2007; and Suriano, this volume). Remarkably, in this entire literature,
youth is seen as being in an oxymoronic state of ‘constant crisis’ (Vigh 2008).
This is oxymoronic because if a crisis is constant, how can it be experienced
as crisis? If the youth themselves reflect on their situation, how then will
they be inclined to define that as being in a state of crisis if it is so very
much their ‘normal’ state of affairs? Also, the notion of youth being in crisis
obliterates, at least so it seems, the possibility of studying ‘ordinary youth’;
who is youth that attend school (see, for an exceptional example, Simpson 2003,
and see Mokam (this volume)), live ordinary and regulated lives, and do have a
caring family and a future to look forward to? Hence, the issue of youth as a
phenomenon is in itself (and not because of its subject) problematic by and
through some of the common or underlying assumptions.
Youth in Africa has also been studied as a concept. The problem here is on the one hand the paradigmatic
point of departure as well as the paradigmatic demarcation. In a range of
studies, the question is posed: when do we begin and when do we stop speaking
of youth, particularly in terms of age? (see Honwana and de Boeck 2005;
Christiansen et. al. 2006; Abbink and van Kessel 2005). These studies give
different answers to the definition of youth if the social science of Africa
intends to do justice to the cultural, historical and political circumstances
and developments that have given shape to the idea of youth in local societies.
Abbink (2005), for instance, argues that for pragmatic reasons in terms of age,
the youth-category can be defined as people belonging to a 14 – 35 years of
age-category. At the same time, he admits that this may deny social, cultural
and political realities whereby, for instance, in the context of AIDS or
violent conflicts, orphaned youth even below the age of 14, may already be
having responsibilities in taking care of entire families that otherwise belong
to adulthood, or one in which people above 35 years of age remain in a state of
dependency and therefore are
4
categorised as ‘children’. The generational
perspective, as invigorated and developed by Alber et. al. (2008), also
perceives of the differentiation of society into age-categories as a
socio-historical construct that of necessity remains ‘fuzzy’ and actually
requires a kind of fuzziness in order to have significance in ever-changing
contexts where the meaning of age is continuously in the making – a point also
developed by Christiansen et. al. (2006) as an aspect of how youth is a
navigating category; i.e., indicating a younger set of people in society that
usually is placed in a position where they need to develop their skills to
navigate changing societal conditions constantly.
Basically these studies address the question of how we can
make sure that we do not superimpose Western categories of social analysis,
which may become meaningless in the particular cultural or historical setting.
Does African youth exist at all and in whose hands rests the conceptual invention
here? Or are we exoticising African youth if we assume that matters must be
different in Africa, compared to the West or Asia (for India see SinhaKerkhoff,
this volume; for Indonesia see Semedi, this volume) when it comes to such
delimitations and demarcations?
Classical studies of African societies and cultures appear
to have been devoting detailed attention to the formation of youth, their
initiation and enculturation, as well as their exploitation in the hands of the
elderly or in their introduction to capitalist regimes that turned them into
cheap labour for the mines or plantations. The formation of power appears to
have put in place its own ‘working definitions’ of who were and are to be
recognised as youths and who therefore can be placed under certain regimes of
control, of labour, of exchange and so forth. In African societies, this has
been much studied in view of the interplay between gerontocracies (the power
and control of the elderly) and the new regimes of production and labour that
came about through colonialism and the engagement with capitalist markets
(Aguilar 1998; Baxter and Almagor 1978; Bradbury 1969). Social science studies
often followed these ‘emic’ categorisations, sometimes naively, believing that
the emic is the royal road to the truth. Yet in addition to this, the
missionary endeavour, the colonial apparatus and the independent nation-states
all put in place systems of education that to a large extent were capable of
capturing youth and which therefore operated on the basis of ideas of what
youth is, i.e. what this social category consists of (comparatively see for
this process in Asia the contribution in this volume on Scouting by Semedi).
While such an institutional encadrement of youth took place (not only in schools, but also the
army or political youth wings for instance), an ambiguity remained about the
precise ‘edges’ of the category of youth. In many societies,
5
the notion of the importance of marriage
for entering adulthood means a societal definition of youth that can extend way
beyond the school-going age (Johnson-Hanks 2002). In other situations and
circumstances, such as that relating to AIDS in particular, orphaned youth are
sometimes forced to take on duties and responsibilities that turn them into
social adults at a very tender age (Robson et. al. 2006; Dahl 2009; Skovdal
2010). Hence, also the meaning and definition of adulthood can shift easily
from situation to situation, making ambiguities even larger. This has
particularly acquired traumatic meaning in the context of war and violence
which sometimes has made youth commit atrocities that upset and disrupted
societies so profoundly that a sense of how and why categories of
differentiation in age can be made vanished completely. In this volume, this
process has been addressed by the contribution of Jourdan on mayi-mayi youth in Congo and by Sanni’s
contribution on youth movements in Nigeria.
Youth as an Ideology of Becoming
The conceptual fuzziness of the idea of
youth has had detrimental effects on the study of youth as a phenomenon. It has
become increasingly fuzzier to understand precisely which groups are studied if
there is no conceptual clarity of their demarcation, nor conceptual clarity of
how their choices, situations and motivations can be understood. The best
social science usually offers is the argument that an understanding must be
‘situational’ and that it must include ‘agency’ although it remains very
unclear where and in whose hands this agency should be located if all is
‘situational’ to begin with (Christiansen et. al 2006; Cole and Durham 2007, de
Bruijn 2007). The diversity of the phenomenon seems to stand in the way of
greater conceptual clarity of how structures of African societies can be
understood and explored in the way in which a location of youth becomes visible
and explainable (Alber et. al. 2008) . As social science in Africa has moved
away from conceptualising youth only in terms of time – a passage through the
generations – and has included the notion of space – not when one is youth but
also where one is youth – the
‘situational’ exploration of youth has at least allowed for the possibility of
looking at space and place as new modes of understanding. In addition to the
concept of youth as emphasising the ‘situational’ it has also turned into the
‘locational’ dimensions. Youth should be understood in their relation to
specific spaces and places, which Christiansen et. al. (2006) have termed
‘navigation’. Youth is thus a ‘navigational’ concept as it indicates how and by
following which trajectories, a ‘certain’ group of people in society produce,
occupy, or escape from certain spaces and places. Redefining youth as an
identity-project of ‘becoming
6
somebody’, this becoming is captured in
navigating certain spaces and places – the bar, the disco, the funeral, the
school, the church, the state, the house and so forth. Youth seem to create
their own landscapes of action and
interaction, their own sites for being young and for acting out their identities;
and situations that seem to fit the idea of the emergence of distinct
‘youthscapes’ (Chatterton and Hollands 2003), forged as these are by the modern
media, migration and new modes of communication.
Maira and Soep (2004) also explore youthscapes in the
context of globalisation, as a way of creating a category of youth on the basis
of social achievement and not as a psychological stage that children naturally
pass through as they grow older. By analysing youthscapes, they are able to
demonstrate how youth always occupy an ambiguous space in the interaction
between local conditions, national ideologies and global markets. Youthscapes
thus indicate the places (local, national or even global) where youth create
spaces for becoming, i.e. a ‘landscape’ of possibilities that specifically mark
the social spaces where being young and where living through the new
experiences that are giving shape to one’s identity, are to be found.
Yet what is lacking in most of these studies is a capturing
or rendering visible of a process that is very much comparable to that of the
emergence of ethnic identities. In the study of ethnicity as a phenomenon of
social, political and economic organisation, and as a concept that serves the
analytical distinction of perceiving a distinct process of identity-formation,
it became increasingly important to also perceive ethnicity as being a form of ideology. We are interested in exploring
ideology in the way it covers the pursuit of certain identity-constructs in the
defence and enlargement of socio-political, socio-cultural and economic
interests in society. That is, in how far is the pursuit of a youth-identity
forceful with regard to processes of inclusion and exclusion in the defence of
such interests? In how far is it becoming normative for (the control of)
behaviour, expression and desires?
By comparison, many factors contribute to the ways in which
ethnicity becomes an ideology, particularly for those subscribing to a
particular ethnic positioning in any social field. The most important
contributing factor to the process by which a particular identity comes to be
rendered meaningful in ethnic terms, thereby signalling authenticity and
belonging, are socio-political interests and resources. The emergence of the
nation-state in many parts of Africa produced new divisions of a socio-political
nature that were easily translated into exclusionary rhetoric (translated into
autochthony: see Nyamnjoh and Geschiere 2000, Werbner 2002, etc.; but see for
an Asian comparative case, Semedi, this volume). Ideas of a primordial nature
of belonging somewhere came to be translated into ethnic identities that
7
functioned to produce exclusionary claims
towards the ones that do not belong and therefore cannot be granted the same
kind of socio-political resources. In the pursuit of ethnic identity, even old
classical anthropological studies could be used as the intellectual resources
that provided the evidence for some of the ethnic claims on resources of any
kind. In many parts of Africa, the debates on ‘autochthony’ demonstrate
forcefully how the rendering of ethnic identities becomes meaningful and
important, but above all, it indicates conflicting arenas where resources are
scarce but where the symbolic stuff to generate ethnic identities of any kind
are abundantly available (Geschiere 2009).
This production of ethnicity as an ideology by and for the
people themselves, who in the process make use of whatever is available, both
as phenomenon and as concept for the social construction of such an identity,
is what can also be observed in the case of youth. Youth has become an
ideological project because an arena of interests and scarce resources has been
generated around it (de Bruijn 2007; Moyer 2003; Nieuwenhuys 2001).
This arena is only partially of their own making as it has
been produced in the context of post-colonial state-formation, the emergence of
civic society organisations, educational systems, foreign NGO-activities and
policies, and rapidly changing kinship patterns as a result of rapid population
growth. Increasingly, governments and parliaments began to discuss ‘youth’ as a
separate category for policy making but also as a kind of formal representation
(see Sinha-Kerkhoff for India, this volume) so that the voice of youth could be
heard in the context of national politics and nation-state building.
Youth as an Ideological Force
In some situations, the recognition of
youth as an ideological force came to serve national or party politics through
the establishment of para-military youth wings and organisations, of which the
Ghana Young Pioneers and the Malawi Young Pioneers became well known if not
broadly feared post-colonial examples. Through programmes like these, the youth
often have become enlisted in the coming into being of the nation-state and the
rise of the nation-state as a political project of identity-formation.
While there was on the one hand, increasingly, a formalised
ideological positioning of youth in the framework of nation-states and civic
organisations, there was on the other hand, also an international influence on
the formation of an ideological positioning of youth (Abbink and van Kessel
2005). International youth organisations also began targeting postcolonial
African societies and the formation of youth bodies in the form of student
organisations, religious youth groups, and associations for care, support,
training and so forth were established in many countries.
8
In addition to the transnational feature of the ideological
positioning of youth, more ‘ideological material’ was rendered meaningful to
youth themselves through the media and through migration. The media have also
opened possibilities of representation of the youth to the public. This is a
representation that goes with the formulation of an ideology, or at least that
goes with the sharing of ideology with others. This particular form of exposure
to an external, in some cases even global, flow of images and ideas by which
the youth acquired the means to formulate ideologies by and for themselves, was
in a sense ‘free’, ‘uncontrolled’, ‘unorganised’, ‘random’ and ‘democratic’
(Cole and Durham 2007). In principle, any youth could tap into that flow as it
usually was able to reach every corner of society easily and randomly through the
spread of modern means of communication (radio, television, magazines, mobile
telephones, internet etc.). Images such as those relating to rap and other
forms of modern youth styles acquired a high velocity of spreading, adoption
and adaptation in many African settings (see Suriano, this volume). In other
words, while youth as a category of age indicates a life-phase of ‘becoming’,
the whole ideological framing of the term youth indicates a process of coming
into being of a specific domain of power that also began to ‘prescribe’ what
these forms of expression should be about. The trope of ‘marginalisation’, as
is often found in such expressions as rap, street-theatre, dance, style and
fashion is very much the product of the ‘ideolisation’ of youth in Africa.
As such, the post-colonial moment became a time in which
youth had unprecedented opportunities to present themselves, make their voice
heard, organise themselves into movements of a religious or political nature
within the context of nation-state projects and make their presence felt
through the media. More than ever before, youth could tap into many different
types of symbolic, political and ideational resources that allowed for the
creation of ideological bedfellows; youth being confronted with an increasing
ideological compartmentalisation of the category of youth in the hands of
governments, NGO policies, transnational mediation, and religious and political
interest, while at the same time becoming agents in their own right in the
establishment of a range of social forms of organisations or groupings that
make available onto themselves the identities that are relevant. ‘Youth’ has
become a project for youth themselves, and these youth happily make use of all
the ideological resources that give the project its distinctive features.
This means that we are talking of ideology in two different
perspectives at the same time; while ideologies (such as religious or political
systems of thought and practice) define, circumscribe and make use of the
youth, and therefore include young people in their ideological projects, this
volume intends
9
to indicate that youth are not passive in
their ideological framing. While ‘youth’ has become a project for governments,
religious and political leaders and NGOs in the ordering of society and
production and control of interests and resources, youth has become an active
ideology for themselves in the pursuit of their own interests; in other words,
they have acquired an ideological force of their own. This is the reason why, as
Durham (2007) has described succinctly for Botswana, youth can manoeuvre
themselves in a position where they control the processes of inclusion and
exclusion on the basis of age-categorisation; and ageism that has acquired new
and unprecedented dimensions in recent years. The Botswana case that Durham
analyses clearly shows how youth, through taking control over youth-programmes,
the youthministry, the financing of youth-affairs and the gaining of control
over important channels for the expression of their desires and identities, do
create the means to exclude others, to monopolise resources and establish a
kind of political favouritism with regard to their position in society.
In the course of this ideological interlocking between
ideologies for youth and ideologies of youth, ‘youth’ has lost its naivety;
too many interests, resources and contestations are at stake; too many
different ideas and political projects are projecting different social orders
in which youth take up different positions; and too many attempts are made to
streamline the youth’s own visions and voices into such contesting notions of
the social.
One particular source for youth to become an ideology that
is capable of enforcing its own interests or that may support the interests of
other groups and institutions in society is and has been religion (see also
Sanni, this volume, for the relationship between youth and Islam in this regard
in Nigeria). In a number of studies on religion in Africa, the issue has been
raised of how and why in specific circumstances and social processes, religious
formations became deeply intertwined with youth. These studies have been
dealing with the introduction and spread of Islam and particular forms of
Christianity and, in fewer cases, has also related to African historical forms
of religion. In the work of Parkin (1972), Palms,
Wine and Witnesses, for instance, the spread of Islam in Kenya is studied
from the perspective of how Islam had to become ‘youthful’ in order to be
successful, and how, the other way around, youth in defending new-found
positions in society were turning to particular forms of Islam to do so. A
similar symbiosis for mutual success can be found in new forms of charismatic
Pentecostalism that have been sweeping through many parts of Africa in recent
years. Its success in places such as Malawi (see van Dijk 1999) was largely
based on the ways in which it connected to the position of youth and, in
particular, to those who wanted change in the gerontocratic structures of
society. Pentecostalism became a
10
place for the youthful to be involved and
the faith contributes to a youth identity whereby the faith itself also
acquired a youthful outlook. In much of the Pentecostal activity in Malawi, the
elderly therefore became the target of conversion and purification strategies
and rituals, being the ones for whom a ‘born-again’ ideology was the hardest to
muster.
There are also much earlier examples of similar processes
on the African continent than the ones referred to so far, which all took place
in the 1970s and 1980s. Earlier examples of similar processes of an intertwined
relationship between religion and youth can be found in the Mchapi-movement that swept through the
southern African region in the 1920s and 1930s. As recorded by Audrey Richards
(1935) at the time, these were youth witchcraft eradication movements which, in
order to be effective, were to consist of youth only. Another historical
example of the way in which youth were effective in terms of producing profound
religious changes were to be found in the activities of millennial and ecstatic
revival preachers, travelling through the southern African region (Fields
1985).
These early examples of youth/religious activities
demonstrate one particular feature this interrelationship appears to produce:
an easy crosscutting of all sorts of borders and boundaries, be they
social-cultural, economic or geographical. Not only is the active spread of
these youthful groups, witch-cleansers, zealous revival preachers and healers
over a wider region remarkable, the way in which this combination of religion
and youth becomes transcultural and appears to be able to render itself
meaningful and effective in very different cultural settings at the same time
is truly noteworthy. In addition, in each of these varied settings, their
activities crosscut boundaries of power, age, cultural respect and prestige and
for some youth it even means upward socio-economic mobility as they gain access
to new resources and opportunities.
This opens-up a perspective which does not only simply
state that religion may want to recruit youth for its own prosyletisation.
While there is no denial of the fact that in Africa some religious formations
indeed have done their best to capture the youth in all sorts of associations
or educational programmes and, as such, have been hoping that by doing so, the
future of the religious body or particular kind of faith would be ensured, this
is not the same as youth-as-ideology, which these early examples appear to have
been demonstrating. In these religious forms, the need and ambition to be young
created the specific impetus to be involved in border-crossing purposefully. In
these groups, to belong to youth created a specific form of power that
otherwise could not be attained and that became a form of power which could be
understood and negotiated religiously.
11
In this collection of articles, this process of youth
appearing in an ideological (including a politically and religiously inspired)
format is being studied in present-day Africa. Due to globalisation, Africa has
witnessed the spread of many new forms of Christianity and Islam across various
parts of the continent, such as Pentecostal or Islamist movements; while in the
domain of African historical forms of religion, new nativist movements have
appeared in which youth again play a dominant role (one example of that is the
Afrikania Mission in Ghana, see de Witte 2008). In each of these forms, the use
of modern means of transport and communication as well as a dominant presence
in the public domain through modern media has become important politically.
This volume features a variety of examples of these new conjunctures between
religion/ideology and youth and the way they translate into modern political
contexts of life in Africa. Whereas earlier youth movements cut across regions
and more localised social-cultural formations, such as kinship patterns or
local forms of authority, in the current context this cutting across borders
has acquired new meaning and a new dynamic. One element is indeed the
increasing importance of the public domain and the civic sector. In terms of
the public domain, being young means to engage in public speech, religiously
endorsed in the form of (evangelical) campaigns, rallies, radio and television
shows, music, performance and so forth. For these forms of religious and
political expression, the element of being ‘youthful’, of having to transmit a
youthful imagery and a youthful identity, appears as of paramount significance
for its success. In these ways, often fundamentalist Christian and Islamic
movements present a youthful imagery as recipe for success and public appeal.
The important question is obviously why? Why is it that
these ideological formations, in the new Africa that we are describing here,
must be youthful? Why is youth as ideology so important in achieving public
success for many ideologies and policies? What is the inherent quality and
nature of the relationship of youth and ideologies that is producing that
success or at least that aspiration of public success?
An important dimension to be explored is the extent to
which youth connect to ideologies in the way that they are not bound by vested
interests. If it becomes ideologically ‘better’ to be young it might also
indicate that in particular circumstances, it is ‘better’ not to have vested
interests in anything. This would mean that we are looking into an ideology
that is particularly ‘footloose’, that depends more on intellectual and social
capital than it builds on ‘real’ capital, that it constructs networks instead
of ties and that, because of its fluidity, escapes much of the control of an
elderly generation. Examples abound of ‘travelling cultures’ of the young in
religious and public terms,
12
such as the street-preachers from Malawi,
the Rap-groups in Dakar and Nairobi, the Talibe of francophone Islamic Africa,
and so forth.
Another element to be explored in this ‘alliance’ between
ideology and youth relates to the fact that this ideology produces new
structures which can be appealing in situations where state-decay and crumbling
of kinship systems produce a real need for replacements, constructed by the
youth themselves. This creates its own counter movements and ideas, attempting
to disqualify the structures that were once dominant in their lives by bringing
them under new checks and balances, which at other moments reinforce the
ideology once more. The youth-as-ideology interpretation allows us to see more
of the agency that commonly is attributed to youth (see de Bruijn et. al. 2007)
but which turns this agency into a counter-hegemonic force to the powers that
be (state, church, party, etc.). Through the various contributions in this
volume, we aim to demonstrate how, not only ideology can cover or inspire
agency in terms of protest, resistance, alternative choice and so forth for
youth, but also how in important ways, ideology itself is part of the
inventions that this agency is producing. Youth are the constructors of this
ideology that pursues ‘youthfulness’ and its interests and desires in
unprecedented ways in current African situations; a reality which the following
contributions demonstrate in their fascinating variety.
The Contributions to this Special Issue
This special issue is the result of a
conference that was held in Dakar in 2006. This conference invited scholars to
reflect on the relation between youth and ideology: Youth and the Global South: Religion, Politics and the Making of Youth
in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. By that time, as is also clear from
the bibliography in this volume, this was still a topic in its infancy.2
Though the study of youth is very prominent in Africa, the comparison with the
same field in Asia and the Middle East has been revealing. In this volume, we
included two studies from Asia (India and Indonesia), and five studies from
different countries in Africa (Cameroon, Uganda, Congo, Nigeria and Tanzania).
The division between studies from Asia and Africa also reflects the general
state of affairs in youth studies in the developing world, which are especially
based on research in Africa.
The articles in this volume
show how diverse the category of ‘youth’ is.
They all refer to a specific category of
youth; in development (Sinha-Kerkhoff, Christiansen), in the nation (Semedi),
within the complex chaos of war and violence (Jourdan and Sanni), as public
performers (Suriano) or as a schooling youth (Mokam). These categories are
often defined from the outside, and then taken up by the youth who become
actively involved in a re-definition in
13
their own terms. Youth as an ideology in
the service of states or organisations becomes an ideology-of-youth for the
youth itself; an ideological resource. The articles all refer to this latter
‘use’ of youth. They do not only refer to religion and politics as an ideology
of youth, but they refer to a much broader domain of ideologisation by the
youth themselves. These domains can be found in music and arts (Suriano), in
the history of war, conflict and insecurity (Jourdan, Sanni), in sexuality in
relation to HIV-AIDS (Christiansen) and in education (Mokam). Youth either
embrace these ideologies or are engaged by them, as in the case of university
youth in Cameroon, in policy formation in India (Sinha-Kerkhoff) and in
Scouting in Indonesia.
The latter idea of ideologies, with which youth are forced
to engage themselves, often takes place in relation to ideologies of youth and
the state. Sinha-Kerkhoff provides us with examples from India. In her case, it
is the state ideologising the youth; i.e. a state that needs youth to celebrate
its own success. This article is set in India, but the process it indicates is
very relevant for African situations as well. The article of Semedi, situated
in Indonesia, relates to youth and the state in a different manner, namely how
through the organisation of youth (scouting) associations the state not only
creates an ideology of youth, but also creates youth as a militant
organisation. Mokam’s article on Yaoundé university youth shows how the state
influences youth in their youthful identity. We can question if such movements
have an ideology beyond their economic goals? The article of Sanni, on Nigerian
youthorganisations, discusses how they act as a protective force. Are they a
reflection of how the state forms the youth, of how youth is an answer to the imperfections
of the state, and whether this informs policies?
However, youth also creates its own ideology. As the case
of Nigeria demonstrates, the youth often create order by basing themselves on
an imagined history of their force in moments of violence. In such cases, the
youth ‘construct’ their own ideological practice in relation to an imagined
past. Another clear example of youth making their own ideology and making their
voices heard is in the realm of popular culture. In Tanzania, music and texts voice
the wishes of the youth and give them strength. It is an example of youth
culture.
How youth organise and shape social relations in society
reflect the presence of new developments in Africa and Asia. In Christiansen’s
article on youth confronted with the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Uganda, the
development of a new categorisation of youth is visible, not imposed by the
state, not created by the youth, but created in the interplay between sexuality
and sociality. The problematic of illness feeds into ideologies of youth and
youth ideology concerning sexuality. Youth then take a social position in how
they intend to
14
(re-)structure sexual and reproductive
relations that are important to them, often contradicting the ways in which the
older generations want these relations to be.
This is a good note to end on: youth taking a social
position by navigating through places and spaces, all linked to new
developments that incorporate youthfulness. This is a social position which is
reinforced by the way they are either included in an ideology or produce an
inclusionary ideology. The question this raises is: who has access to this
ideologisation of youth? And who are these youth that are producing ideologies
of themselves? In the end, we therefore face the paradox that while youth is
often excluded from the formulation of ideologies that shape their lives, this
self-ideologisation is at the same time producing new modes of exclusion. This
is setting a new agenda for the social sciences of youth in Africa and beyond;
an agenda to which this volume aspires to contribute on the basis of a number
of wellinformed and empirically studied cases.
Notes
1.
This is not only an issue of discussion in the African
context, as similar patterns can be found in India (see Sinha-Kerkhoff in this
volume).
2. The
Bibliographic Overview (Klouwenberg and Butter) in this volume reflects the
results of literature search carried out in 2005 and is complemented by more
recent publications dealing with ‘youth’.
References
Abbink,
Jon and Ineke van Kessel, eds., 2005, Vanguard
or Vandals: Youth Politics and Conflict in Africa, Leiden: Brill.
Abbink,
Jon, 2005, ‘Being Young in Africa: The Politics of Despair and Renewal,
Introduction’, in Jon Abbink and Ineke van Kessel, eds., Vanguard or Vandals: Youth Politics and Conflict in Africa, Leiden:
Brill, pp. 1-34.
Aguilar,
Mario I., ed., 1998, The Politics of Age
and Gerontocracy in Africa: Ethnographies of the Past and Memories of the
Present, Trenton NY and Asmara: Africa World Press.
Alber,
Erdmute, Sjaak van der Geest and Susan Reynolds Whyte, 2008, Generations in Africa: Connections and
conflicts, Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Baxter,
Paul TW and Uri Almagor, eds., 1978, Age,
Generation and Time: Some Features of East African Age Organizations,
London: Hurst.
Bradbury,
Robert E., 1969, ‘Patrimonialism and Gerontocracy in Benin Political Culture’,
in Mary Douglas and Phyllis M. Kaberry, eds., Man in Africa, London: Tavistock, pp. 17-36.
15
Bourdillon,
Michael, 2008, ‘Children and Supporting Adults in Child-Led Organisations’, in
Erdmute Alber, Sjaak van der Geest and Susan Reynolds Whyte, eds. Generations in Africa: Connections and
Conflicts, Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Bruijn,
Mirjam de, 2007, ‘Agency in and from the Margins: Street Children and Youth in
N’djaména, Chad’, in Mirjam de Bruijn, Rijk van Dijk, Jan-Bart Gewald, eds., Strength beyond Structure: Social and
Historical Trajectories of Agency in Africa, Leiden: Brill, pp. 263-284.
Bruijn,
Mirjam de, Rijk van Dijk and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds., 2007, Strength beyond Structure: Social and Historical Trajectories of Agency
in Africa, Leiden: Brill.
Chatterton,
Paul and Robert Hollands, 2003, Urban
Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power, London:
Routledge.
Christiansen,
Catrine, Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh, eds., 2006, Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African
Context, Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute.
Cole,
Jennifer and Deborah Durham, 2007, ‘Introduction: Age, Regeneration and the
Intimate Politics of Globalization’, in Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, eds.,
Generations and Globalization: Youth,
Age, and Family in the New World Economy, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, pp. 1-28
Dahl,
Bianca, 2009, ‘The Failures of Culture: Christianity, Kinship, and Moral
Discourses about Orphans during Botswana’s AIDS Crisis’, in R. Prince, Ph.
Denis and R. van Dijk, eds., Africa
Today, Special Issue, vol. 56, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 23-43.
Dijk, Rijk
van, 1999, Pentecostalism, Gerontocratic
Rule and Democratization in Malawi: The Changing Position of the Young in
Political Culture, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Durham,
Deborah, 2000, ‘Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa: Introduction to
Parts 1 and 2’, Anthropological Quarterly,
vol.73, no. 3, pp. 113-120.
Durham,
Deborah, 2007, ‘Empowering Youth: Making Youth Citizens in Botswana’, in
Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, eds.,
Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 102-131.
Fields,
Karen Elise, 1985, Revival and Rebellion
in Colonial Central Africa, Princeton: NJ/Guildford, Princeton University Press.
Garcia,
Mario and Jean Fares, eds., 2008, Youth
in Africa’s Labor Market (Directions in Development), Washington D.C.:
World Bank.
Geschiere,
Peter, 2009, The Perils of Belonging:
Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Honwana,
Alcinda, 2006, Child Soldiers in Africa,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Honwana,
Alcinda and Filip de Boeck, eds., 2005, Makers
and Breakers, Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa, Oxford: James
Curry.
Johnson-Hanks,
Jennifer, 2002, ‘On the Limits of the Life Cycle in Ethnography: Toward a
Theory of Vital Conjunctures’, American
Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, pp. 865-880.
16
Last,
Murray, 2005, ‘Towards a Political History of Youth in Muslim Northern Nigeria,
1750-2000’, n Jan Abbink and Ineke van Kessel, eds., Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, Politics and Conflict in Africa,
Leiden: Brill, pp. 37-54.
Lindegaard,
Marie Rosenkrantz, 2009, ‘Coconuts, Gangsters and Rainbow Fighters: How Male
Youngsters Navigate Situations of Violence in Cape Town, South Africa’, PhD
Dissertation, Amsterdam, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Maira,
Sunaina and Soep, Elisabeth, eds., 2004, Youthscapes:
The Popular, the National, the Global, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Moyer,
Eileen Marie, 2003, In the Shadow of the
Sheraton: Imagining Localities in Global Spaces in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’, Amsterdam:
Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Nieuwenhuys,
Olga, 2001, ‘By the Sweat of Their Brow?: “Street Children”, NGOs and
Children’s Rights in Addis Ababa’, Africa
/ International African Institute, vol. 71, no. 4, p. 539-557.
Nyamnjoh,
Francis and Peter, Geschiere, 2000, ‘Capitalism and Autochtony: The Seesaw of
Mobility and Belonging’, Public Culture,
vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 423452.
Parkin,
David, 1972, Palms, Wine and Witnesses:
Public Spirit and Private Gain in an African Farming Community, London:
Intertext Books.
Perullo,
Alex, 2005, ‘Hooligans and Heroes: Youth Identity and Hip-Hop in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania’, Africa Today, vol. 51, no.
4, p. 75-101.
Pype,
Katrien, 2007, ‘Fighting Boys, Strong Men and Gorillas: Notes on the
Imagination of Masculinities in Kinshasa, Africa/International
African Institute, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 250-271.
Richards, Audrey, 1935, ‘A Modern Movement of
Witchfinders’, Africa, vol. 8, no. 4,
pp. 439-451.
Robson,
Elsbeth, Nicola Ansell, Ulli Huber, William Gould, and Lorraine van Blerk,
eds., 2006, ‘Young Caregivers in the Context of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic in
sub-Saharan Africa’, Population, Space and
Place, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 93-111.
Skovdal,
Morten, 2010, ‘Children Caring for Their “caregivers”: Exploring the Caring
Arrangements of Orphans and Vulnerable Children in Western Kenya’, AIDS Care, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 69-103.
Simpson,
A., 2003, “Half-London” in Zambia:
Contested Identities in a Catholic Mission School, Edinburgh University
Press for the International African Institute.
Sommers,
Marc, 2006b, ‘Fearing Africa’s Young Men: Male Youth, Conflict, Urbanization
and the Case of Rwanda.’ in Ian Bannon and Maria Correia, eds., The Other Half of Gender: Men’s Issues in
Development, Washington DC: World Bank.
Sommers,
Marc, 2006a, ‘In the Shadow of Genocide: Rwanda’s Youth Challenge’, in Siobhán
McEvoy-Levy, ed., Troublemakers or
Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peacebuilding, South Bend: University of
Notre Dame Press.
17
Sommers,
Marc, 2003, ‘Youth, War, and Urban Africa: Challenges,
Misunderstandings,
and Opportunities’, in Diana Varat et al, eds., Youth in Developing World Cities, Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars.
Trudell,
Barbara, ed. 2002, Africa’s Young
Majority, Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh
Vigh,
Henrik, 2006, Navigating Terrains of War:
Youth and Soldiering in GuineaBissau, New York: Berghahn.
Vigh,
Henrik, 2008, ‘Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on
Continuous Conflict and Decline,’ Ethnos,
vol. 73, no. 1, pp. 5-24.
Weiss, Brad, 2005, ‘The Barber in
Pain: Consciousness, Affliction and Alterity in Urban East Africa’, in Alcinda
Honwana and Flilip De Boeck, eds., Makers
& Breakers: Children & Youth in Postcolonial Africa, Oxford: James
Curry, pp. 102-120.
Werbner,
Richard, 2002, ‘Introduction: Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal
Citizenship in Botswana’, Journal of
Southern African Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 671-684.
Witte,
Marleen de, 2008, ‘Spirit Media: Charismatics,
Traditionalists, and Mediation Practices in Ghana, PhD dissertation,
University of Amsterdam.
No comments:
Post a Comment