Originating at a Kenyan conference in 2006, this collection examines youth and generation in East Africa (i.e., Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) in a historical perspective with nuanced insights drawn from anthropology. A well-argued introduction by Andrew Burton and Thomas Burgess leads to twelve chapters mostly by leading social historians trained in North American and British universities, whose seminal research is reflected here. Although these scholars have tackled some of the topics elsewhere, they are indeed essential to the volume’s cumulative argument. One co-editor, who contributed a chapter, is a French historian; only two contributors—in literature and in religious studies—are from East Africa (Kenya).
Drawing on extensive evidence (secondary works, state and missionary archives, oral sources, pamphlets, explorers’ accounts, Swahili and English newspapers), the collection concentrates primarily on the twentieth century, with the first two chapters examining the precolonial period. This asymmetry might be explained by the lacunae of extant sources and by the scant studies of the earlier period, or it may stem from the book’s thesis that colonialism engendered unprecedented tensions in generational relations in Africa, when adulthood had to be negotiated in new ways.
The introduction sets the book’s intellectual agenda in three key themes: the deep socioeconomic and political changes of the nineteenth century; the attempts by elders, colonial officials (often overlapping), and postcolonial authorities to control youth over the longue durée (18); and the methodology of studying youth and generation in Africa—is youth a primary or secondary identity? is it a homogeneous term? Although hardly a straightforward and unproblematically defined grouping, youth is seen to be a discrete social category that emerged mostly in the twentieth century. Besides being culturally specific, the notion of youth varies depending on the historical circumstances: when a society experiences a social crisis, new ideas of childhood and adolescence emerge.
The shifting category of generation—which scholars should examine because it matters in African cultures—has long governed relations in the continent, where it has served to “explain social differences” and regulate customs (19). Gerontocracy and patriarchy served to maintain social order in Africa, where complex systems of obligations, submission, and sacrifice were used by seniors to exercise control over social subordinates. Although local differences make generalizations difficult, it is largely true that marriage in most agrarian societies afforded a young man social advancement through access to women and reproduction. Generational tensions, then, resulted from changing “expectations among youth regarding their obligations and responsibilities” (18).
Seen as marking a turning point in relations between youth and elders, colonialism had significant repercussions for local ways of thinking about the generations. And yet colonialism notwithstanding, considerable continuities with the past and the resilience of local modes of thought persisted, particularly in rural areas where youth remained largely dependent on and deferential to elders.
In the first chapter, Richard Reid shows that in the interlacustrine regions of Uganda and northern Tanzania the institutionalized exercise of violence and participation in war—often “a young man’s game”—marked key moments of transition to adulthood amid the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Across the region aggressive male youth were revolutionaries hubristically challenging the status quo, but without completely rejecting the existing social structure. Their recruitment of boys—at once victims and perpetrators of violence—is reminiscent of the seemingly recent phenomenon of child soldiers. Older men were ambiguous toward young men, whom they celebrated for their physical strength but also feared and condemned. According to Reid, violence and war in the nineteenth century, which weakened African states and societies, affected later responses to colonialism. Next, Dave Eaton’s study of Pokot men in the Kenyan Rift Valley shows the long-term tensions that existed between generations, arguing that cattle raiding today cannot be attributed merely to traditional rustling among pastoralists or to a recent weakening of social bonds and commercialization. More nuanced historical and political perspectives are required to understand these reckless conflicts. Both essays examine male violence in broader contexts, and effectively contest “Afropessimist” concerns about any recent breakdown of the authority of elders and the rise of irresponsible male youth.
Examining neglected German missionary booklets and informed by his intimate acquaintance with local oral narratives, James Giblin explores the role of three young Christian converts in the early twentieth-century Southern Highlands (present-day Tanzania) under the Germans. Giblin’s fascinating account reconsiders debates over what John Iliffe notably called the “Age of Improvement” (after the 1905‒7 Maji Maji war) and the everyday “economy of affection” of agrarian societies. His focus on continuing and affective ties between generations despite shifting historical circumstances contrasts with Reid’s emphasis on increasing intergenerational distance. But this may result from the diverse dynamics at play in the two situations. The irreversible change caused by colonialism did reduce opportunities for attaining adulthood; maturity was no longer achieved through marriage, but rather through Christian missions and schooling. Youths, however, had to negotiate new choices with their patrons: Giblin stresses the vital role of a “language of kinship and family” in equating patron‒client relations to the mutual obligations that exist between fathers and children (77). The link between schooling and achieving adulthood is also the focus of Hélène Charton-Bigot’s study of the first fifteen elite Kenyan boys and politicians-to-be who pursued secondary education after 1945. They attended a colonial school that aimed to enhance obedience and order (i.e., dependence), at the same time enabling them to become adults (therefore, autonomous). Andrew Burton’s essay, “Raw Youth, School-Leavers, and the Emergence of Structural Unemployment in Late Colonial Tanganyika,” explores the cyclic concerns over “idle” male youth that led colonial—and later, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU)—officials to implement repatriation policies.
Much of the argument presented in this part of the book has to do with the limits of the colonial state and postcolonial continuities—a recent academic leitmotiv that here, interestingly, combines an analysis of social change and youth’s “demoralization” in urban and rural contexts. Richard Waller looks at rural Kenya between the wars, when both British officials and Maasai elders tried to control unruly young Maasai male warriors (murran) (for the purposes, respectively, of enforcing order or achieving material advantages), who were seen as defiant and indolent. Attempts to eradicate the institution of murranhood proved unsuccessful, because young Maasai men valued it more than colonial institutions.
Carol Summers’s essay on British Uganda picks up a number of previous themes such as the notion of youth as culturally specific rather than “natural,” and colonial officials’ prevalent views of youth as unsettling. Colonial, missionary, and indigenous perceptions of the Buganda kingdom saw it pejoratively as “adolescent”; but after 1945 young male Baganda radicals turned this metaphor into a way of promoting a rupture with the past.
In their absorbing essays on male youth (vijana), James Brennan and Thomas Burgess tease out a number of complexities inherent to urban spaces in twentieth-century Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. They explore, respectively, the youth leagues of TANU and the Afro-Shirazi Party; the aspirations and dilemmas of nation-building; the parties’ endeavors to erase political opposition and enforce urban discipline; colonial and postcolonial attempts to discipline young men’s potentially violent behavior; coercion and the heavy request for sacrifice during socialism. Brennan argues that the fight for adulthood was also a means to access urban citizenship. Using sources inaccessible to earlier scholars, Burgess illustrates young Zanzibari men’s experiences in rural labor camps and the state’s hostility toward ostentation in a society where conspicuous consumption and cosmopolitan fashions had long been used as markers of identity, given Zanzibar town’s connection to the cultural world of the western Indian Ocean.
The introduction highlights the enduring concern over the alleged collapse of youth morality due to external influences: elders tend to “assume the worst of succeeding generations” and “idealize the experience and behaviour of their own” (17). Such generational nostalgia informs Shane Doyle’s chapter on assumptions about African sexual promiscuity and preoccupations with (mostly female) pre- and extramarital sex in the Great Lakes region (1900‒80), as well as Justin Willis’s essay on local debates over the state’s attempt to ban foreign alcoholic drinks in 2005 Kenya. Doyle argues that premarital sex is a product of the late colonial period, but elders today bemoan it as a recent phenomenon. Premarital sexuality in twenty-first-century Kenya, the crisis of initiation rites, HIV/AIDS in historical perspective, and contemporary perceptions of Kenyan women as sexually dangerous are the themes of Joyce Nyairo and Eunice Kamaara’s essay, a gendered and rather gloomy examination based upon textual analysis.
The book is not devoid of minor shortcomings. Most contributors concede the lack of women in these studies and their somewhat ungendered analyses, which they attribute to the scarcity of sources. And there is no coverage of the role of Islam in attaining adulthood; indeed, there are too few studies on this topic. Furthermore, the book could have included photographs and perhaps a contribution on cross-generational interaction and popular cultural forms (song lyrics, clothing, or proverbs). Finally, the peculiarities of the French debate (if any) are absent, and once again Anglophone scholarship dominates.
Nevertheless, given the demographic predominance of youth, the short life expectancy in Africa, and the scholarly necessity to counter views of African youths as victims, this collection is most welcome. It makes a solid contribution to a burgeoning field, which will be ever more essential for scholars of East Africa and for students of history and anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as for humanitarian workers. It should inspire further rigorous research, hopefully pursued more by African scholars.
