Alcinda Honwana and Filip de Boeck (Eds), Makers and Breakers: children and youth in postcolonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey (pb £16.95 – 978 0 8525 5434 0). 2005, 320 pp.
This book appeared some years ago but deserves attention due to its original contribution to youth studies in/on Africa that are reassessing the role of young people in Africa as versatile social and political actors. It is a quite fascinating collection of, mostly, empirically based studies on children and young people in Africa, and expresses the emergence of a wider general interest in the subject, not only among academics but also among governments, NGOs and international organizations. Several other general studies and collections have appeared in the past few years, often with a similar antinomy in title – although this book leaves out the question mark – reflecting on the rather dismal state of childhood and youth on the continent.
In 2008 we saw the crisis in Kenya after the December 2007 elections victimizing thousands of children in what appeared to be a rather stable country, and also the re-emergence of the ‘Al Shabaab’ (‘the Youth’) in southern Somalia, a terrorist Islamist rebel group wreaking havoc on the social fabric and the livelihoods of ordinary people, many of them children caught in the crossfire of war and terror. These events attest to the perpetual insecurities but also violent involvement of young people across the continent.
Preceded by a somewhat heavy introduction by the editors, who incidentally do a good job of praising their own work as ‘unique’ and ‘exceptional’ in the preface – there are ten chapters by well and lesser known experts on the topic. The work is concluded by a useful afterword by Mamadou Diouf, Professor of (African) History at the University of Michigan.
A distinct anthropological perspective predominates and has yielded a series of important and well-documented case studies based on fieldwork. The chapters provide an in-depth picture of interacting factors like precarious economies, crumbling cultural norms and representations, and state abuse or absence in producing and perpetuating social crises for young people in Africa. Even if there has been a much-vaunted phase of ‘economic growth’ in Africa in recent years, the benefits of this have neither reached most people nor led to a significant decline of poverty and of conflict (cf. Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria or Eritrea).
Most of the contributions call for a focus not primarily on the problems of exclusion and marginalization, but on the agency of children and youth, a by-now familiar and still valid point in studies of young people. The book provides revealing cases of agency, but cannot hide the fact that, overall, things are not going well for young people.
Some of the contributions, while original, unfortunately often contain phrases that remain ambivalent and here and there tend to ‘aestheticize’ the experiences and problems of young people in Africa. For example, this sentence from the introduction I find hard to swallow: ‘Relegated to non-places and resorting to borderlands, young people, as bearers and producers of these mutant messages, constantly remake their composite identity and lived world and redeploy long-standing local moralities in the intersection with moral global forces in new and often surprising ways’ (p. 11). No doubt true, but can this not be said in a more simple way? The introduction and the general essay by Jean and John Comaroff provide many such colourful flourishes. In the chapter ‘Reflections on youth, from the past to the postcolony’, the Comaroffs radically problematize the concept of youth as a universal category, but forget about native views of youth and about insights from developmental psychology. The chapter is useful as a discussion of the wider social and ideological contexts in which to study youth in Africa, but hyperbolic language and often ambiguous phrasing make it rather difficult to read.
De Boeck's interesting essay on ‘witch-children’ in Kinshasa reveals the tragic story of such young children, by definition innocent but the object of superstitious scapegoating practices that may be ‘understandable’ in the dramatic context of the city's urban confusion, but are also the direct result of economic crisis and the lack of governance, education and public order in this failing state where imaginative though irrational supernatural thought frames are blighting social relations. His evocative account, with much resort to psychology, is fascinating, but also raises the question of what is explained (or what can be explained) by it.
A particularly welcome chapter in the book is that by Mats Utas on ex-RPF combatant girls in Sierra Leone and their survival strategies: a major piece of ethnography and of thoughtful reflection. In Abdullah's chapter, predominantly male (ex-)rebels in the same country are discussed, tracing the roots of their activities back to a violent youth culture that emerged in the country after the 1970s. Honwana contributes an incisive chapter on (former) child soldiers in Mozambique as ‘tactical and interstitial agents’, Reynolds writes on the suffering and pain experienced by Southern African children in contexts of political conflict and its effects on identity formation, and Weiss has a chapter on the subjectivities and pains of urban youth in Tanzania under conditions of domination. The late Tshikala Biaya has a chapter comparing street youth culture in Dakar, Addis Ababa and Kinshasa, which is revealing of the shared yet locally distinct problems faced by young urban outcasts and entrepreneurs; the author argues that juvenile street culture both gives expression to new forms of sociability and evokes the ‘permanence’ of institutional violence (p. 215).
Many of the chapters inevitably contain disturbing descriptions of the tragic lot of children in violence, making the best of it (‘agency’), sometimes even finding thrills in it and turning from victim to perpetrator (Honwana, p. 50), but obviously also suffering tremendously and perhaps irreparably, and becoming hardened ‘adults’ at an unripe age.
There are also two good chapters by Durham, on the significance of Herero youth choirs in Botswana, and by Argenti, on the attitudes of youth (and women) in Oku, Cameroon, towards newly constituted masquerade performances. Both chapters, also based on detailed, original fieldwork, are less concerned with the impact of violence and deprivation, highlighting instead the cultural creativity and expressions of young people.
This collection is quite an interesting read and has already taken its place in a recent series of edited works that have appeared on the subject of youth in Africa (but which, curiously, hardly if at all refer to each other). It can be considered as an essential reference work on the problems and painful dilemmas of young people and children in Africa and stimulates comparative scrutiny and alternative explanations of their experiences and the challenges faced by them.
