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Africa: Youth, "Waithood," and Protest
AfricaFocus Bulletin
July 31, 2013 (130731)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"This morning I would like to focus our attention on the lives of
young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of
finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil
liberties. ... The recent wave of youth protests can best be
understood in the context of this generation's struggles for
economic, social, and political emancipation. ... Beyond the
disparities in their material, cultural, and political situations,
young people in rich and poor countries are affected by similar
problems of exclusion and restricted futures. And they are
beginning to assert their rights as citizens, claiming a new space
for themselves." - Alcinda Honwana
Based on recent research in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and
Tunisia, this lecture by Alcinda Honwana is fundamental reading for
anyone trying to think about the prospects for social
transformation in Africa and around the world. This AfricaFocus
Bulletin contains extensive excerpts, shortened somewhat for
reasons of length. The full text, including bibliography, is
available in pdf format at
http://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/lugard.html
Update
For background on elections in Zimbabwe, see last week's
AfricaFocus Bulletins at
http://www.africafocus.org/docs13/zim1307a.php and
http://www.africafocus.org/docs13/zim1307b.php
Sources for current news include
http://www.swradioafrica.com/
http://allafrica.com/zimbabwe
http://www.google.co.zw/elections/ed/zw
http://www.sokwanele.com
http://www.zimelections2013.com/
For commentary on the independent role of the trade unions in
Zimbabwe, see
http://www.solidaritycenter.org/content.asp?contentid=1689
On twitter follow hashtag #zimelections
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa
Alcinda Honwana
International African Institute Lugard Lecture 2013
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial
-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
[Excerpts. Full lecture, including bibliography, available at
http://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/lugard.html
[This lecture was first presented at the Fifth European Conference
on African Studies, Lisbon, 28 June 2013
Alcinda Honwana is visiting professor of anthropology and
international development at the Open University. She has taught at
the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, the University of Cape
Town and the New School in New York. ... Her most recent work has
been on youth and social change in Africa focusing on Mozambique,
Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia.]
Introduction
This morning I would like to focus our attention on the lives of
young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of
finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil
liberties. Political instability, bad governance, and failed
neoliberal social and economic policies have exacerbated
longstanding societal problems and diminished young people's
ability to support themselves and their families. Many are unable
to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place
as fully-fledged members of society. The recent wave of youth
protests can best be understood in the context of this generation's
struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation.
In this lecture, I will develop three fundamental arguments:
First, young Africans are living in waithood, a prolonged period of
suspension between childhood and adulthood. I found the notion of
waithood - to which I will return later - particularly relevant for
analysing this stalemate. Youth transitions to adulthood have
become so uncertain that a growing number of young men and women
must improvise livelihoods and conduct their personal relations
outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks. Their
predicament is particularly galling, but it also inspires some to
devise creative solutions. In recent years the accelerated economic
growth raised hope for solving the socioeconomic challenges facing
the continent. Yet, there is scepticism among youth that growth
alone, without equity, will bring the solution to their problems.
My second argument is that the recent protest movements, led mainly
by young people, stem directly from the economic and social
pressures they suffer, and from their pervasive political
marginalisation. And the young are moving from dispersed and
unstructured social and political acts into more organized street
protests.
And thirdly, while these social movements have been able to
overthrow regimes, systemic transformation takes time and requires
more than a mere change in leadership. Major challenges arise in
the process of transition as a new political order is being
established. Young activists appear to be struggling to translate
the political grievances of the protest movement into a broader
political agenda. Clearly, they seem to be more united in defining
what they don't want and fighting it, and much less so in
articulating what they collectively want. The key questions then
become: how to play an active role in politics and governance,
beyond street protests, and how to create space for a new kind of
politics?
This analysis is based on in-depth interviews I conducted with
young people in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia,
between 2008 and 2012, which resulted in my two most recent books:
The Time of Youth: Work Social Change and Politics in Africa
(published in August 2012 by Kumarian Press in the USA), and Youth
and Revolution in Tunisia (published in June 2013 by Zed Books in
the UK). Taking the perspective of the youth involved in these
movements, I examine their sense of being 'trapped' in a prolonged
state of youth, and their view that global and national political
structures create serious obstacles to real change and new
politics.
Let me start with three specific instances:
Thousands of young Mozambicans staged riots in Maputo in early
September 2010, to protest a substantial rise in the prices of
bread, water, and fuel. Using text messaging to mobilize their agemates,
they blocked the streets, burned tires, and confronted the
police. The escalation of these protests forced the government to
concede and reverse the price hikes. Few non-Mozambicans were aware
of these dramatic developments. [See http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/moz1009a.php and
http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/moz1009b.php]
The events in Tunisia in 2011 attracted international attention.
Youth from diverse social strata articulated grievances ranging
from unemployment, to corruption, to the denial of free expression.
They not only mobilized other Tunisians to oust the regime of Ben
Ali, but also inspired similar activism within the continent, in
the Middle East, and more globally. However, after the ousting of
the regime, formal party politics superseded the broad base
coalition of the street protests and marginalized young activists.
In Dakar in June 2011, rallying around the movement Y'en a Marre!
(Enough is enough!), Senegalese youth came out to the streets,
clashed with police, and managed to stop the approval of
constitutional amendments that would benefit former president Wade.
Galvanized by this victory, and using the slogan "Ma Carte
d'Electeur, Mon Arme" (my voting card, my weapon), the young
Senegalese helped to remove Abdoulaye Wade from office in February
2012.
In the past couple of years, apart from the well-known events in
Egypt and Libya, young people took to the streets in antigovernment
protests in Sudan, Angola, Burkina Faso, Malawi and
Nigeria, among other places in the continent. The Middle East,
Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and more recently Turkey, have all
witnessed youth riots.
But youth protests have become a global phenomenon, not just an
African and Middle Eastern story. Here in Portugal, in March 2011,
the so-called geração; rasca (precarious generation) came out to
the streets to denounce unemployment and the high cost of living.
Since May 2011 the indignados (indignant) movement in Spain has
been protesting economic inequalities and the lack of prospects for
youth. In the UK, in August 2011, the killing of a young black man
from Tottenham, in North London, sparked violent riots; youth from
the poorest neighborhoods (and certainly not only from immigrant
communities) burned cars and buildings and looted luxury goods,
forcibly taking the desirable symbols of a consumer culture from
which they feel excluded. In South America, Chilean students filled
the streets of Santiago to demand high quality, low cost public
education. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street Movement
rallied many young Americans to protest corporate greed and
corporations' undue influence over government.
Beyond the disparities in their material, cultural, and political
situations, young people in rich and poor countries are affected by
similar problems of exclusion and restricted futures. And they are
beginning to assert their rights as citizens, claiming a new space
for themselves.
The challenges facing young Africans
What factors make waithood in Africa particularly depressing? Young
Africans constitute a disenfranchised majority, largely excluded
from major socioeconomic institutions and political processes.
Whatever their class background, many youths cannot afford to form
families and households and are unable to become fully independent
and partake in the privileges and responsibilities of social
adulthood.
Liggey, which means work in Wolof, the national language of
Senegal, is celebrated as an important marker of adulthood. The
ability to work and provide for themselves and others defines a
person's self-worth and position in the family and in the
community. Yet, the majority of young people in Senegal and
elsewhere in Africa are unable to attain the sense of dignity
embedded in the notion of liggey.
In southern Mozambique, in the past, becoming a labour migrant in
South Africa constituted a rite of passage into adulthood, as jobs
in the South African mines helped young Mozambicans to become
husbands, fathers, and providers for their families and, in turn,
allowed young women to become wives, mothers, and homemakers.
Today, however, African societies do not offer reliable pathways to
adulthood; traditional ways of making this transition have broken
down, and new ways of attaining adult status are yet to be
developed.
I use the notion of waithood, which means 'waiting for adulthood,'
to describe this prolonged period of suspension when young people's
access to social adulthood is delayed or denied. While their
chronological age may define them as adults, they have not been
able to attain the social markers of adulthood: earning a living,
being independent, establishing families, providing for their
offspring and other relatives, and becoming taxpayers. They are
consigned to a liminal space in which they are neither dependent
children nor autonomous adults.
Waithood was first used by Dianne Singerman (2007) in her work on
youth in the Middle East, as she looked at delayed family formation
and the increasing rates of youth unemployment. I found this notion
to be very helpful in capturing young people's feeling of being
blocked in a stage of prolonged or permanent youth. Waithood also
evidences the multifaceted realities of young Africans' difficult
transition to adulthood, which goes beyond securing a job and
extends to aspects of their social and political life.
Bongani, a 30-year-old man from Soweto in South Africa, has not
been able find secure jobs since finishing matric (high school
diploma) several years ago. He survives on temporary jobs mainly
replenishing shelves in supermarkets and retail stores; he is not
married but fathered a child, but without a steady and regular
income, Bongani is unable to provide adequate support to his child.
Bongani's story is very common across the continent. Ibrahim
Abdullah (1998) and Abubakar Momoh (2000) have pointed to the use
of the vernacular term youthman, in many West African countries, to
describe those who are stuck in this liminal position.
Thus, rather than defining youth on the basis of age groups, I
understand youth as a socially constructed category defined by
societal expectations and responsibilities (Honwana and De Boeck
2005). A 40-year-old who is unemployed and unmarried is still a
youthman. In contrast, at the age of 10, child soldiers, AIDs
orphans, or child labourers assume adult roles, even if many of
them are later on pushed back into waithood.
While Singerman's usage of waithood suggests a sense of passivity,
my research indicates that young people are not merely waiting, and
hoping that their situation will change of its own accord. On the
contrary, they are proactively engaged in serious efforts to create
new forms of being and interacting with society. Waithood involves
a long process of negotiating personal identity and financial
independence; it represents the contradictions of a modernity, in
which young people's expectations are simultaneously raised by the
new technologies of information and communication that connect them
to global cultures, and constrained by the limited prospects and
opportunities in their daily lives.
The severity of the impact of waithood on the lives of young
Africans depends on each individual's character, abilities, and
life skills. But it is also, largely, a function of their family
background, level of education and access to resources. Those from
the middle class who well connected are better placed to secure
jobs and have a smoother trajectory towards adulthood. But the
experience of waithood also differs by gender. Men face the
pressures of getting a steady job, finding a home, and covering the
costs of marriage and family building. Although women are becoming
better educated and have always engaged in productive labour
alongside household chores, marriage and motherhood are still the
most important markers of adulthood. While giving birth may provide
girls an entry into adulthood, their ability to attain full adult
status often depends on men moving beyond waithood (Calvès et al.
2007).
Coping with waithood
Youth are especially vulnerable to the structural conditions that
generate poverty and limit socioeconomic mobility. Declining
opportunities in rural areas lead young men and women to migrate to
the cities, where their chances of finding employment and stable
livelihoods remain very slim. Although growing numbers of young
people are completing secondary school and even attending
university, the mismatch between educational systems and the labour
markets leaves many unemployed or underemployed; they are pushed
into the oversaturated informal economy or become informal workers
in the formal sector (Chen 2006).
Young Africans have developed their own terms to convey the
extemporaneous and precarious nature of their lives. Young
Mozambicans use the Portuguese expression desenrascar a vida, to
eke out a living. Young Senegalese and Tunisians employ the French
term débrouillage, making do. Young South Africans speak about
"just getting by."
The idea of desenrascar a vida or débrouillage situates the
waithood experience in the realm of improvisation, or "making it up
as you go along," and entails a conscious effort to assess
challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to the
achievement of specific goals (Vigh 2009). These young people
operate like Lévi Strauss's (1962/1966) bricoleur, a 'jack-of-alltrades'
who manipulates and takes advantage of circumstances
whenever possible to attain his/her own ends. Their actions sound
like Michel de Certeau's (1984) tactics, or daily struggles that
respond to immediate needs rather than longer-term strategies
designed to achieve broader ends (Honwana 2006).
This experience and orientation is shared by young men and women
who engage in street vending, cross-border trading and smuggling;
those who plan and plot to migrate illegally to South Africa or to
Europe; and those who end up in criminal networks as swindlers,
traffickers, and gangsters. Young women and men also use their
sexuality as a means of gaining a livelihood by engaging in
intimate relationships with sugardaddies and sugarmamas for money,
gifts, and access to fashionable goods. Indeed, as Christian GroesGreen
(2011), Mark Hunter (2010) and others have pointed out, these
new types of relationships are replacing previous patterns of
intimacy among young people and generating new understandings of
masculinity and femininity (Honwana 2012). Some young people become
successful entrepreneurs by repairing electronic devices; making
and marketing clothing and jewellery; and doing hair and nails.
Others are creating new artistic, musical, and performance forms,
making graffiti, painting murals, writing blogs, and becoming savvy
Internet users.
In this sense, young women and men in waithood develop their own
spaces where they subvert authority, bypass the encumbrances
created by the state, and fashion new ways of functioning on their
own. These youth spaces foster possibilities for creativity; and as
Henrietta Moore puts it, for self-stylization, "an obstinate search
for a style of existence, [and] a way of being" (Moore 2011: 2).
The process of self-styling is made easier by cyber social networks
such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
...
Waithood constitutes a twilight zone, or an interstitial space,
where the boundaries between legal and illegal, proper and
improper, and right and wrong are often blurred. It is precisely at
this juncture that young people are forced to make choices. Their
decisions help to define their relationships towards work, family,
and intimacy, as well as the type of citizens they will become.
Rather than being a short interruption in their transition to
adulthood, waithood is gradually replacing conventional adulthood
itself (Honwana 2012).
Many young people see waithood as stemming from national and global
policies that have failed to reduce poverty and to promote
equitable and broadly distributed economic growth. According to
various political economists, structural adjustment programmes have
seriously weakened African states' ability to determine national
policies and priorities, and to uphold the social contract with
their citizenry (Rogerson 1997; Manji 1998; Potts 2000). Bad
governance, corruption, and the absence of fundamental freedoms
compound this predicament. Recent accelerated growth rates in the
continent bear considerable promise. However, growth alone, without
equity, will not guarantee social inclusion and better lives for
the majority of the population. Indeed, young people rebel against
the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the rampant
corruption that they observe as elites enrich themselves at others'
expense.
From non-movements to protest movements
Young Africans today are generally better educated and more closely
connected with the rest of the world than their parents. The young
people I interviewed did not seem like a 'lost generation' nor did
they appear apathetic about what is happening in the societies
surrounding them. They are acutely conscious of their marginal
structural position, and no longer trust the state's willingness
and ability to find solutions to their problems. In their shared
marginalisation, young people develop a sense of common identity
and a critical consciousness that leads them to challenge the
established order (Honwana 2012, 2013).
Like other social groups, youth have always been involved in
everyday processes of social change by fashioning the spaces within
which they try to get by and assert their rights. Asef Bayat calls
these dispersed actions 'non-movements,' which he describes as
"quiet and unassuming daily struggles" outside formal institutional
channels in which everyday social activities blend with political
activism (2010: 5). In Africa, young women and men engage in civil
society associations, in popular culture, in debates through cyber
social networks, and in political demonstrations. If we pay careful
attention to the lyrics of their songs, the verses of their poems,
the scripts of their plays, and the discourses propagating in their
Facebook pages, blogs, tweets, and SMSs we uncover a strong
critique of the status quo.
...
Over the past few years, however, young people have moved from this
"quiet encroachment" (Bayat 2010: 56) on public space to a more
open and vociferous takeover of the national political stage,
questioning their waithood status and demanding better lives. By
taking to the streets united and braving police, some have
overthrown dictatorships, voted out corrupt leaders, and forced
governments to reverse unpopular decisions. In fact, from a vantage
point outside dominant ideologies, the younger generations are
capable of envisioning society and the polity anew precisely
because of what Karl Mannheim (1952) calls "fresh contact," a novel
outlook that arises as they assimilate, develop, and alter the
social and cultural repository received from previous generations.
Yet, despite their successful protests, young Mozambicans have not
seen fundamental changes in their socioeconomic conditions; young
Senegalese are growing disappointed with the new government; and
young Tunisians remain deeply dissatisfied with the direction and
slow pace of change. All of them realise that translating a protest
movement into an ongoing political presence that can shape public
policies at the national level constitutes an immense challenge
(Honwana 2013).
Once old regimes fall and the enthusiasm and energy of street
protests wane, 'traditional' and more established political forces
quickly move in to occupy the institutional vacuum, reverting to
'politics as usual' while making some cosmetic changes. Young
activists find themselves more divided; the broad unity forged
during street protests dissipates as they struggle to articulate a
new common purpose and to define a new political role for
themselves. While ensconced political forces have blocked youth's
political involvement, the horizontal and non- hierarchical
structures adopted by the youth movements did not provide them with
clear leadership to contend for power and enter the formal
political arena. In the aftermath of street protests, young people
appear to be retreating back to the periphery of formal politics,
into their 'non-movements.'
The new 'politics'?
Many young activists denounce old-style party politics and object
to being manipulated by politicians, whom they regard as corrupt
and self-serving. They consciously distance themselves from
partisan politics, refusing to transform their movements into
formal parties. In Tunisia, young activists continue to exert their
veto power in the streets, and many refrain from participating in
the partisan manoeuvring that has preoccupied the transitional
government and the opposition parties in recent times (Honwana
2013). Similarly, the activists of Y'en a Marre in Senegal declined
to join Macky Sall's cabinet or to form their own party. Even those
young activists who hold party memberships often complain that
their voices are ignored.
...
Young people are already developing alternative sites for social
and political intervention beyond party politics and within civil
society organisations. They establish and engage with associations
that involve political action without requiring party membership.
They fight for freedom of expression in the real and virtual
worlds; they head anti-corruption and open-government campaigns;
they work in youth leadership development programs, women's rights,
environmentalism and such like.
In Tunisia, young activists are enjoying the freedom of independent
civic and political engagement following the revolution, as these
were banned under the old regime. But at the same time, their
disappointment with party politics makes some young people turn to
politicized forms of Islam. For example, the famous rapper of the
revolution, 'El General,' is today an advocate for the instauration
of Sharia law, and the lyrics of his latest song, titled "I Wish,"
call for Tunisia to become an Islamic state. Indeed, young
Islamists who joined radical Salafist groups believe that Sharia
will be the solution to their problems because, as some of them put
it: "Sharia is not politics, but a whole way of life, with its laws
and its science."
In Senegal, the Y'en a Marre activists pride themselves on being
non-partisan and vow to work towards making politicians accountable
to those who elected them. After the protests, the movement is
focusing its efforts on a national public campaign to create what
they call a 'New Type of Senegalese' described as: one that is more
socially and politically conscious, assumes her/his
responsibilities as a citizen, and fights for the well-being of the
Senegalese people.
However, will civil society associations, as platforms of political
action, be enough to help steer meaningful political change? Will
it be possible for the younger generation to drive the creation of
a new political culture from outside dominant political structures?
Will street protests remain young people's main mechanism for
exerting pressure on those in power? How does this generation
envision the 'new politics'? These are some of the questions that
will merit further research and analysis as the wave of youth
protests and political transitions continue to unfold.
Intriguingly, my young interlocutors seem to believe that it is
possible to achieve fundamental change outside of dominant
political structures, even if they have not yet fully articulated
how to do so. In their view, transition processes are not linear;
they take time and are full of twists and turns along the way.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the 'waithood generation' is
already standing up for itself, and making its mark in the world.
I thank you.
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