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Ateliers d'anthropologie
Revue éditée par le Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de
sociologie comparative
47 | 2020
Jeunes en question(s)
Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa
Anne-Marie Peatrik
Translator: Matthew Cunningham
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/12620
DOI: 10.4000/ateliers.12620
ISSN: 2117-3869
Publisher
Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC)
Electronic reference
Anne-Marie Peatrik, « Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa », Ateliers d'anthropologie [Online], 47 |
2020, Online since 14 January 2020, connection on 04 February 2020. URL : http://
journals.openedition.org/ateliers/12620 ; DOI : 10.4000/ateliers.12620
This text was automatically generated on 4 February 2020.
Ateliers d'anthropologie – Revue éditée par le Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative
est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation
Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International.Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 1
Towards an anthropology of youth
in Africa
Anne-Marie Peatrik
Translation : Matthew Cunningham
1 Intellectual curiosity that turned into methodological investigation was the point of
departure for this issue with deliberately sober titles, presenting a blueprint for an
anthropology of youth in Africa. While completing issue 42 of Ateliers d’anthropologie
(Rivoal and Peatrik, 2015)—which explored young people in the southern
Mediterranean, based on the category shabâb (which means “young man” in Arabic and
covered shared questions and research themes)—the idea arose to comparatively
explore the categories “young people” and “youth” in sub-Saharan Africa. Current
events also inspired this extension since young people in Senegal, Burkina Faso and
other countries seemed to be following in the footsteps of their peers north of the
Sahara in mobilising against the powers that be. “Young people” could thus offer a
stimulating means of deepening an anthropology of the ages of life, by examining not
the succession of ages, but one particular age from the perspective of a transcultural
variation (Peatrik, 2001, 2003a, 2015a).
2 A little-known fact should be recalled at the outset: “African youth”, a familiar
presence in media and the public sphere, has a history dating back to the early 20th
century. Identified in the 1920s with the “detribalised” young person quick to threaten
the pre-eminence of elders and disrupt the colonial order (D’Almeida-Topor et al., 1992;
Burton and Charton-Bigot [eds], 2010; Ocobock, 2017), African young people and youth
blossomed in the postcolonial imagination with the eruption of a wide variety of crises
that unsettled the independent states, against a backdrop of population growth with its
controversial but obvious effects.
3 Youths primarily constitute a demographic category and are rooted in a statistical
reality. In the majority of African countries, the median age of the population is around
20 years, and it is as low as 15 in certain countries like Niger and Uganda. “In 2015, 44%
of sub-Saharans (outside of Southern Africa) were under 15 years of age, two thirds
were under 25; in Africa as a whole, less than 4% are over 65” (Magrin et al., 2016: 14–
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 2
15). These figures cover a variety of local realities, particularly from the point of view
of the demographic transition; however, those realities are not yet affecting the
general trend.
4 For authors who are thinking at the scale of the African continent and endeavouring to
place their arguments in certain perspectives—from Joseph-Achille Mbembe’s first
book (1985) to Alcinda Honwana’s essay (2012), to Stephen Smith’s recent essay (2018),
their publication dates alone illustrating the phenomenon’s timespan—young people
and youth in Africa alternately inspire hope or pessimism: sometimes they are the
nation’s shining lights thanks to schooling, and offer proof of the continent’s economic
emergence, sometimes they are threatening troublemakers and hooligans, and then
sometimes they are icons of desperation, such as when we see the figures of street
children, or those of child-soldiers, or young migrants at the 18-year borderline,
grouped under the banner Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) according to the latest
international public policy category (Golaz and Thibon [eds], 2015; Peatrik, 2015b).
5 At the more specific level of their disciplines, researchers are also tempted to play upon
simplistic oxymorons: perpetrator/victim, guilty/innocent, heroes/villains, makers/
breakers, vanguard/vandals, particularly in their titles, even though their studies
display the reserve and distance that are proper for observation and analysis. However,
the list of the titles of the main collective books that have been published since the turn
of the millennium1 indicates, in addition to a reorientation towards this generation, the
desire to return to more neutrality and explore ordinary children and youth in Africa
(Durham, 2000) in their diversity and concrete activities—a concern that we share in
returning to the reflexivity that this special issue encourages.
1. Conceiving the heterogeneity of the “young people”
category in Africa
6 The large number articles received in response to the call for submissions that
preceded this issue2 confirms the enthusiasm that “youth” is inspiring among
researchers working in Africa. However, few of them took account of the critical and
reflexive dimension that the call encouraged in the treatment of the categories “young
people” and “youth” in Africa, and the articles ultimately chosen, exploring highly
specific subjects, represented disparate intentions.
7 Rather than lament this, it seemed more judicious to turn the lens around and question
this heterogeneity (also that of the discipline), something that reveals a field in which
young people and youth in Africa remain poorly identified subjects of knowledge. 3 This
observation, which runs counter to common conceptions, calls for a few explanations,
inasmuch as knowledge on this nascent field is not widely shared. Unlike Western
societies, for which a sociology of youth has long existed (Galland, [1991] 2011; Van de
Velde, 2008, 2015), there is nothing equivalent for African youth. On the one hand,
ethnographers and anthropologists have produced an accumulation of knowledge on
customary societies that is considered to have been more or less surpassed by
contemporary changes and thus essentially invalidated. On the other hand, studies
scattered around the respective intellectual perimeters of political scientists,
demographers and historians—and more belatedly a few anthropologists and
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 3
sociologists—have certainly made it possible to identify problems, but have not paved
the way for cumulative knowledge.
8 This essay aims to build bridges between these areas of knowledge—in short, to reflect
upon the possibility of an anthropology of youth. “How not to do away with young
people and youth in Africa?” was the first, slightly provocative title proposed for this
issue. Parodying humanitarian messages and prophesies on African youth, it was also a
play on Bourdieu’s (1984) famous interjection during a 1978 interview with an
apprentice researcher (“Youth” is only a word), but it added confusion to a stock-
taking process that was already proving to be difficult. 4 An introduction to the articles
will provide an immediate idea of the disparate character of the analyses on young
people and youth in Africa, and root the lineaments of an anthropology in the
empirical investigation, in dialogue with the authors (few in number) who have made a
significant contribution to these explorations.5 Deconstructed over the course of its
historical emergence, the “young people” category will be analysed in relation to the
connected concepts “cadet social” [“social non-firstborn”], “junior” and “young
generation”. Its examination from the perspective of its demographic dimension and
from that of calendar age will then lead to a newly founded examination of the shifting
labels on this phase of human development, and the uncertainty of its boundaries. This
new interpretation of the “young people” category in Africa will make it possible to
identify new investigation frameworks suitable for capturing underlying dynamics, and
to pave the way for a variety of comparisons.
9 The first section contains three articles dealing with East Africa, the region of choice
for original political systems that are based on the extensive use of age and generation
criteria, in which authority is (now “was” for most of the populations concerned)
renewed every time power is transmitted between consecutive generations and a new
set of Fathers arrives (Peatrik, 1995a and b). In this context, youth—or more precisely
its equivalent(s)—is not linked to the idea of crisis, nor credited with an exceptional
valence: as a link in the chain of ages, endowed with moral and physical characteristics
and distinctive aptitudes, youth is socially conceived or conceptually defined in the
same way as other ages when they are indexed according to a grade or status.
10 Among Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya—who are often confused with their
more famous cousins the Maasai—Giordano Marmone observed informal sessions that
combined playing and learning, in which all children, and then only boys, practiced
singing and dancing. In these sessions, he examined how the aptitudes of boys who
could become leaders of future generational classes are identified and developed. These
self-selection methods within groups of kids, and then of “uncircumcised ones”, in
preparation for later choices reveal that beginning at this stage, the children’s
exhibited egalitarianism and their group spirit coexist with practices favouring
competition, individual distinction and the assertion of personal authority. What these
sessions illustrate is counterintuitive in relation to fashionable ideas about societies
with age sets: that beginning in childhood, youths learn to come to terms with the
values of equality and hierarchy at the heart of the existence modalities of those
traditional democracies.
11 Also among the Samburu, Bilinda Straight shifts the focus and analyses youth by
bringing together two points of view: on the one hand, that of warrior-initiates (formed
into generational classes) and their lovers, whose special links with them are sealed by
a gift that each man gives to his lover, consisting of pearls and necklaces that are worn
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 4
proudly and boost her reputation; on the other hand, that of the colonial
administration, through a human interest story that arose in the 1930s and was turned
into a political opportunity by colonists determined to continue seizing those herders’
pastures. The colonists credited the idea that those young women test the ability of
those warriors by encouraging them to launch raids and attack enemies. Not only does
this episode still influence opinions and current land disputes, it also sheds original
light on the gender relations at work between these youths, and on the capacity for
action attributed to girls and young women, before boys and girls respectively
transition to the stage of getting married and establishing a family.
12 In the now much-transformed context of the lives of the Tigania-Igembe Meru (agro-
pastoralists in the north-east of Mount Kenya who used to have a political system based
on generational sets), Anne-Marie Peatrik tackles the question of age boundaries, the
differentiation of “youth”, and the transition to “adulthood” in that old age-grade
society. Counter to generally accepted ideas about them, the transition to the next
grade was neither automatic nor devoid of strong tensions, something that the
societies and cultures in question show through narratives, rules and a special
vocabulary designed to handle this. Analysis of the tensions at work in terms of status
consistency will be informed by a comparison with the concept of “vital conjunctures”,
in a way that is not contradictory but complementary, in order to contribute to an
anthropology of youth that is viewed from the perspective of its boundaries in this
case.
13 The more numerous contributions in the next section explore West Africa, not in order
to introduce the differences between the two macro-regions, but because different
phenomena relevant to young people are studied there. Some of the articles describe
situations mixing traditional aspects with more contemporary dynamics, and almost all
of them touch upon political engagement and occasionally revolt. Finally, the
mobilisation of the image of youth appears, viewed as a rhetorical and ideological
resource, and also viewed in its continuity with the imagination of the generation.
14 Anna Dessertine explores what can “be youth” in a Mandinka patrilineal and village
society in Guinea, where the category “young person” does not exist as such. She does
this through the study of grins, those places scattered around the village where
unmarried young men meet to share tea. This custom, which has a connection with a
longstanding age-set sociability, also responds to the exhortation that young men
should live outside the family home. Contrary to appearances, in grins, the young men,
who are cadets [males who are not firstborn], are far from doing nothing and steeping
in boredom. They amuse themselves clashing in spars of status, and are also displaying
their availability to the older young men and elders, while some of them get ready to
organise their departure to gold-bearing zones or further afield, some migrating to
Europe.
15 Also in a village and lineage context—this time among the Bété of the Ivory Coast, a
formerly acephalous ethnic formation long integrated into the machinery of the
contemporary state—Léo Montaz examines other forms of action taken by young
people, who in this case belong to youth associations. During and after the Ivorian
Crisis of 2002–2011, young men who returned to the village against the tide of the rural
exodus revived customary age divisions or “youth associations”, which were used to
put pressure on elders and legitimise their demands for access to land property and
cultivation plots. By mobilising the vocabulary of autochthony in opposition to
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 5
“foreigners”, they were also aiming at their integration into the village leadership.
Illustrative of the historicity of youth in Africa, the youths’ assertion as a strategic
group also reveals deep changes in customary societies and in the power of elders.
16 In another acute crisis situation, that of illegal oil extraction from the Niger Delta and
the rise of violence and civil war in Nigeria between 1996 and 2009, Akin Iwilade
studied ways of “being young” (versus “being youth”) as a symbol of membership in
drug gangs. Often growing out of former youth cultural societies typical of Delta
populations—societies that have been turned into criminal associations—these youth
gangs linked to oil diversion networks got their hands on certain districts, like the one
they deliberately nicknamed Colombia in Port Harcourt, the Delta’s main oil city.
Putting up a violent and anarchic front, their complex organisation enabled them to
control the drug trade and prostitution. More broadly, this very special context
provided a framework for the expression of rival and operational representations of
young people and youth, illustrative of the manipulation of an ad hoc image of the
young person as a power resource.
17 Jeanne Lamaison-Boltanski studies another trajectory of the categories “young person”
and “youth”, connected with the political engagement of Rasta and hip-hop musicians
who have become notorious protagonists of the “Civic Broom” movement in Burkina
Faso. Or how these “outcasts”, followers and producers of a locally condemned
counterculture, succeeded in mobilising public opinion and found themselves at the
forefront of a protest movement that made it possible to hold regular elections (2014–
2015). Products of a combination of global and local influences mixing Rastafarianism,
references to a transnational urban youth culture, claims of Sankara heritage and the
circulation of digital tools, these rappers ended up catalysing civic criticism against the
existing powers, by making themselves the crystallisation of positive images of youth
and societal renewal.
18 In the Tuareg communities of Niger and Mali, which were once highly stratified but are
now undergoing profound change, Susan Rasmussen explores the unique position of
youths who, in an urban context, perform in various mini theatrical presentations.
Used by NGOs to circulate messages in response to crises that more particularly affect
young people, these sketches staged in cities extend and update an old theatre and
performance practice. The spirited artistic engagement of these youths and the interest
they arouse stem from the fact that these actors, who come from various status
backgrounds, mobilise common references: belonging to the same “age cohort” marked
by the experience of unemployment, migration and rebellion, they formed a “historic
generation”. From this comes the effect of the trans-Tuareg category—reflecting all of
the problematic components of their communities—and their effectiveness/legitimacy
on stage. It is also the source of their position as mediators not only between
generations, but between their local society and the outer world. These youths on stage
show, and provoke reflection on, subtle social-code changes or custom preservations,
confronting unprecedented situations and experimenting with new interactions.
19 Echoing these various cases, Muriel Champy analyses three monographs on categories
of African young people. The small number of available monographs (in the sense of in-
depth studies of a single phenomenon or group), is itself indicative of the incomplete
state of knowledge. The three analysed cases are more particularly understood from
the perspective of expectation and planned projects. Among the rural young people in
Senegambia studied by Paolo Gaibazzi (2015), the decision whether to leave or stay
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 6
extends an old migratory custom and represents a situation in which sedentariness, far
from being synonymous with immobility, turns out to be a strategy, nowadays being
subject to reassessments and status reversals. Jacinthe Mazzocchetti (2009), in her
study of a cohort of young people (young men and women) pursuing higher education
at the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), analyses how this generation was
strongly affected by structural adjustment policies enacted in 1991. The concrete
conditions of student life are examined: the lifestyles of these young people, sociability
in student residences, as well as the quality of study conditions and teaching. Special
attention was given to how their expectations and upward social mobility strategies
were redefined, particularly as a function of their background and gender identity.
Finally, Sasha Newell (2012) questions—for a segment of urban young people in Abidjan
devoted to the criminal economy—what is represented by the asserted identification
with “Nouchi” culture. In the “maquis” (drinking establishments) that they frequent,
the “youth” culture that they assert, named after a popular Ivorian dialect, is
synonymous with financial and physical ostentation, as well as with demonstrations of
their ability to tolerate alcohol and get girls. These are like signs of modernity insofar
as they contrast with inherited culture, that of the existing customs and powers.
20 Two articles making up the final section offer points of view that are both divergent
and convergent: one exploring South Africa, marked by its well-known past as a long-
term settlement colony and its apartheid heritage; the other explores Tunisia, and
could be seen as tying up with the dialogue sketched at the beginning on “shababs”
(Ateliers d’anthropologie, 42) and enriching the comparative reflection on problems that
intersect.6
21 Sandrine Gukelberger looks back at youth in the past, through anti-apartheid activists
from the old townships of Cape Town who evoke their life history. The radical violence
of the time of their youth gave them the reason for their political activism, or for a kind
of avoidance, particularly on the part of women. This retrospective approach to the
historic so-called Soweto generation of the 1976 youth insurrection, which some
considered a “lost generation”, makes a special contribution to the anthropology of
youth in Africa. Through a sociology of the politicisation that made youth into the time
when opinions were formed that persisted in the course of existence, this contribution
also sheds light on the emergence of youth as a descriptive and explanatory category in
the field of African studies in the early 1980s, during the Soweto decade, concomitant
with the end of decolonisation.
22 Stefano Pontiggia analyses the action and mobilisation methods of young men in
southern Tunisia’s mining city of Redeyef, which is plagued by chronic unemployment,
obviously a repercussion of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011. The spectacular tactics
used to block railways used for phosphate wagons—burning tyre barriers or setting up
precarious camps—stem not so much from an attraction to insurrection, but rather
from having observed means of putting pressure on the state’s remuneration
distribution system. Excluded from cronyist networks for various reasons, these young
men caught in a lasting state of unfulfillment attempt to take part and take turns in the
general system of waiting for work. This article, illustrating the circulation between
North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa of ideas and concepts (particularly the recurrent
theme of waiting/expecting), reminds us not only that in the North African context,
the category “young men” corresponds to a lasting status of subordination defined by
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 7
the lack of house or land ownership, but also that a “young person” can have surpassed
the age of youth.
2. Young people, cadets and generations: reviewing
some elementary concepts
23 Young people and youth: these labile, sometimes incantatory designations, whose
vague, catch-all definitions favour their broad dissemination, circulate in a tangle of
connected notions and concepts that are sometimes taken for synonyms. The time has
come to clarify them.
24 “Youth”, most simply, designates an age of life differentiated from other ages
(childhood, adulthood, old age), and the “young person” designates the person
characterised by the distinctive attributes of youth. Though these categories are
apparently obvious, they are not universal or natural (this already-old observation is
starting to be shared7), and it is precisely around these aspects that some of the
analytical problems revolve.
25 It has been highlighted many times that in Africa, civil status age—that of the number
of years since the date of birth—has little meaning, and also that the age called youth,
like other ages, is primarily conceived in relational terms: one is older or younger than
the person under consideration. Things are not quite so simple in reality, but it is
important to start from this dimension. It enables the second dimension to be better
tackled: the categorial component of youth and its intrinsic temporality (probably less
familiar because of the questions it covers), which is extended by the last dimension
considered here, namely understanding through the point of view of the actor, through
his projections and expectations. Thus delimited, this exploratory essay does not aim at
exhaustiveness. It sketches the broad perimeter in which the anthropology of youth in
Africa belongs, and raises a few key descriptive and analytical problems.
Cadets sociaux and cadets
26 In recent decades, in almost all fields of African studies, the designations “youths” and
“youth” have gradually replaced the previously very fashionable category “cadet social”,
variously indexed in African French by the antonyms korocratie [rule of the old or elder]
or grandfrèrisme [olderbrotherism], which could have served as titles for this
development. We agree that a cadet is not necessarily a youth, and a youth is not
automatically someone dominated or dependent, but there is social and conceptual
proximity that has caused overlapping and substitution between the two notions, and
this should be scrutinised.8
27 The history or intellectual genealogy of this change—revealing the increasing
inadequacy of the concepts for studied societies that are themselves in the grip of
change—remains to be written, but it manifests itself in a number of texts (Le Meur,
2005; Dessertine, present volume; Montaz, present volume; Lamaison-Boltanski,
present volume; Gaibazzi via Champy, present volume). Let us note a few milestones
that can shed light on my argument.
28 As we all remember, the notion of “cadets sociaux”, which was already circulating in one
way or another, was theorised by political scientist Jean-François Bayard (1979: 233–
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 8
281; 1985: 325–326) in his analysis of the state in Cameroon: through their lineage
position, which deprived them of positions of authority and control over revenue
sources, cadets were aggregated with other potential or real excluded groups in African
societies (women, youths, people of modest means, precarious workers, etc.), hence
that idea of “social” cadets in the plural, which included the little man and the reject,
beyond mere “family” cadets. This broadening of a category with shifting boundaries
met the need to characterise the whole troop of dependents, subordinates, clients, the
dominated and so on, while avoiding tacking Western-centric (and therefore
inappropriate) notions of “social classes” onto African realities.
29 To better understand all the ramifications, it is necessary to take another look at what,
in Africa, is understood by cadet in the strict sense—that is to say lineage cadet(s)—and
review a few basic notions. Some of them pertain to very traditional knowledge and
elementary definitions, while others need to be clarified. 9
30 The lineage or filiation group (more specific than the usual “descent group”) is broadly
represented in Africa, without being universal, and this is one of the problems
connected with the analysis of youth. A lineage is a social group constructed on the
basis of a unilineal descent rule (patrilineal or matrilineal) traced from a reputed
common ancestor. Its internal organisation is based on the birth order of the siblings.
The firstborn (son or daughter) is the cornerstone of the set, and those who follow are
his or her cadets. The lineage stems from him or her, their lineages hierarchising into a
firstborn and cadet line, preceding a possible segmentation and dispersal.
31 This order of precedence is immutable. Over time, cadets (younger or youngest siblings)
get older and remain cadets. Even after becoming accomplished, a cadet man potentially
remains a cadet. Succession adjustments exist, and the cadet’s relationship with the
firstborn and elder siblings can assume several forms (such as adelphic succession), but
the principle of lineage primogeniture remains. Thus one can understand how a young
person who is the firstborn is not in the same position nor promised the same
trajectory as a young cadet, even if both of them pass through the phase “youth”.
32 These structural principles, which are essentially rules and values internalised by the
actors, have at least two implications. As the extended family enlarges and develops,
cadets, who are always more numerous than firstborns, are in a lasting relationship of
subordination: mobilised in the context of the household economy, cadets will have to
wait their turn before acceding to marriage and a less dependent position. Remember
that Claude Meillassoux (1960, 1975), searching for production relationships through
the magnifying glass of historical materialism, characterised this organisation as a
“household mode of production” or “lineage mode of production”, based on the
exploitation of the productive force of cadets and the reproductive force of women. One
can imagine that this provoked lively, protracted debates, particularly with theorists
working on kinship and marriage, or with representatives of the various currents of
historical materialism.10 Subsequent generations of researchers in African studies no
longer felt concerned by these controversies, but the notion of the cadet social stayed in
their conceptual toolbox for a while.
33 Furthermore, in a number of village societies, this recurrent disjunction between age
and birth-rank has given rise to categories and age-set associations that group together
the youths of a village or district, following a principle that cuts across lineage
memberships. These age groups, which assume a very wide variety of forms—
combining initiation rituals, residence criteria, pastimes, work, and formerly war
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 9
activities—have particularly caught the attention of ethnologists. Mainly aggregating
young people, and less commonly other age groups, they were perceived as a way to
reinforce social cohesion, that of the village or that of networks whose members were
scattered, by thwarting lineage segmentation dynamics that favoured the departure
and secession of cadets.
34 Here too, the existence of these categories of young people has generated numerous
analyses. Examined from the point of view of lineage modes of production, young
people’s categories and associations have been seen as reinforcing the exploitation of
cadets by their elders. Or as Shmuel Eisenstadt’s (1954, 1956) theoretical contribution
argues, the young people’s groups were intended to compensate for an inadequate or
defective family organisation.11 These two positions were relativised by a return to field
ethnography advocated by Denise Paulme (1971), who revealed the full complexity of
lineage/age-set combinations, specifically in West Africa (Dugast, 1995). In East Africa,
when generation-set system dynamics prevail (Bernardi, 1985; Peatrik, 1995a and b),
lineage dynamics are secondary or even non-existent. We will return to this.
35 Five articles in this issue (Dessertine, Montaz, Iwilade, Lamaison-Boltanski, Champy on
Gaibazzi—and see also Balac [2016]), explore these problems and reveal to various
degrees the continuities between old age-set associations and contemporary forms of
youth grouping (quite often by cadets) that have been inspired by the break-up of
families and by the social crisis. Bands of juvenile delinquents can certainly impose
their reign in the paroxysmal context of civil wars, but their existence does not
necessarily mean that pre-existing principles have disappeared or been forgotten. The
force of primogeniture and ancestrality transforms and persists, continuing to pervade
minds in places where it is valued, weaving one of the backdrops of the anthropology of
youth in Africa (Marie, 1997 (ed.); Champy, 2016).
Young people and juniors
36 In semantic fields that are similar to the point of being confused with one another, it is
now necessary to examine the equivalence—in ordinary language and often in
methodical language—between junior and cadet, and between their relational
counterparts senior and firstborn, which the superimposition between seniority and
primogeniture exacerbates. Seniority would make it possible to capture the firstborn
and the senior at one and the same time in a single term: in short, to effect a kind of
synthesis between two principles of precedence, that of lineage and that of age sets,
lineage seniority and age-set seniority, so that they cohabit to the point of
superimposing one another and being confused with one another.
37 This attempt at synthesis in Africanist anthropology fed on comparisons between West
Africa and East Africa: in these regions, the analysis of generation-set systems was
progressing (Stewart, 1977; Baxter and Almagor, 1978), whereas the distinction
between lineage and generation system had not yet really been established. The
apparent continuity between these two forms of organisation seemed to admit of a
conceptual assimilation following Dan Sperber’s 1974 hypothesis on Dorze people of
Ethiopia. This merger, which was based on a misunderstanding, was taken up again ten
years later in a collective book exploring age and power in Africa (Abélès and Collard
[eds], 1985: 7–15):
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 10
The father/son relationship connotes an open, or relative, seniority; it marks a
superiority benefiting the former but leaves free access to this superiority through
the advancement of generations—that is to say those of the son. The firstborn/
cadets relationship designates a closed or absolute seniority; this seniority
establishes an inescapable superiority benefiting the firstborn, and the
disadvantaged cadet has no way out other than through practices (of secession) and
manipulations (of genealogical charts), enabling him to change position (Balandier,
1974: 106–107, quoted by Abélès and Collard, 1985: 11).
38 This elegantly-worded extract from the second chapter of Anthropo-logiques entitled
“Pères et fils, aînés et cadets”, Balandier (1974: 63–111), speaking of lineage in Africa,
introduced the confusion between this and generation-set systems in Africa. 12 Despite
their resemblance, the father/son lineage relationship is quite different from the
father/son generation-set relationship. The “seniority” that is a component of both—
though nuanced by the epithets “open” or “closed” (Balandier remained prudent!)—
created a false synthesis that propagated by means of this incidentally very interesting
collective book that, probably as a sign of the times, attempted to conceive of “age”,
irrespective of the definition, in light of power, no matter what its institutional modes
of existence, throughout Africa.13
39 Remember that over time, a young person/junior becomes a senior, elder or old
(wo)man. On that basis, we are either in a lineage context or generation-set context.
Lineage is exclusive of the junior/senior relationship in the strict sense of the term: if
the young person who has grown old is a firstborn, he doubles his stake in a sense; if
the young person is a cadet, he is doubly subordinated in his youth, and in old age
remains a subordinate elder, unless his eldest brother dies. Of course the people
concerned endeavour to pull these strings, and of course organisations exist such as
those age associations mentioned above, but only to a certain point, beyond which
conflict or ruptures arise in what constitute institutions. As for generation systems
(less widespread, but critical in analytical terms), they are structured by the succession
to power of generation sets and the senior/junior relationship by which every junior
becomes a senior in the course of time. In no society can these two mutually exclusive
principles apply as the primary principle of organisation. 14 If we stick to the strict
meaning of the terms—which is the objective here—a junior is not a cadet, and a senior
is not a firstborn, and the seniority they are said to share is a view from the minds of
analysts (Peatrik, present volume, 1995a and b).
Young people and young generations
40 “Generation”, a terribly labile category, now adds itself to this tour of related notions.
It has made remarkable headway in studies on youth. What is at play in this shift from
“young people”, an age category, to “generation”, a different type of category that
researchers have been using, as indicated by the book titles mentioned at the beginning
of this essay (see the list of books in note 1)?
41 Deployment at the generation level, or simply adding a generational element, gives a
different structure to young people and youth, while maintaining a certain vagueness
in the boundaries, one that is conducive to integrating as many as possible. When
viewed as a generation, the assortment of young people conceived as free electrons—
often cadets individualised by the lineage and family crisis mentioned above—turns into
a large group, a totality established by the idea that they are self-made. Their similarity
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 11
and identity also came from being or having been young at the same time, being or
having been contemporaneous with major events that marked their period of
development, as if they had come out of the same cultural or ideological mould, from
the same school of life. Having become a “generation”, young people placed in a
multidimensional temporality gain an additional legitimacy, one that is ideological but
also conceptual.
42 This singularly polymorphous category permits of many combinations. First and
foremost it becomes possible to circumvent the conceptual conflicts generated by the
cadet/junior/young-person superimposition (we have just seen the surreptitious shifts
in meaning that caused it). At the same time, it defines youth and young people in
comparison with other adjacent and alternate generations, those that preceded them
and those that will follow. Young people are not primarily conceived as belonging to
the same age category, but are viewed rather in their generational relationships,
without explicit reference to the family said to be anomic, and outside of the sphere of
the parents: people can say they belong to the same generation without reference to
any kinship link. Encompassing or diluting the birth rank criterion, “generation”
brings an additional paradigm for conceiving of shared belonging, equality, and also
hierarchy and domination.15 The young generation furthermore incarnates the
regeneration of the social body, and by extension, the possible generation conflict or
“generation gap”, the quintessential manifestation of modernity, of which Mead ([1970]
1978) was the grand priestess.16
43 “Generation” also has the great conceptual advantage of being a category that crosses
boundaries, whereas this is less the case with “youth” because it lacks historicity. 17
Certain major international events have had a lifelong effect on those who were young
when they took place (Newman, 1996; Cole and Durham, 2007: 1–28). “Generation”
became a special medium for conceiving of globalisation—driven by capitalism or
liberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000, 2005)—or political mobilisations, whether
historical (Burgess, 2005b) or contemporary (Kagwanja, 2005; Maupeu, 2012; Pontiggia,
present volume). The analysis in Alcinda Honwana’s (2012) essay on the political
mobilisation of youth in Africa and in the Muslim world (as well as elsewhere) was
partly based on the transnational notion “waithood generation”: young people stuck
without achievements and without transitioning to adulthood. We will return to this
later.
44 This fact is far from neutral, since it reflects and relates to debates that have always
marked African studies. To the same extent that cadets sociaux seem to have lost their
analytical attraction—as if they had been linked to a concluded phase of African
societies, that of decolonisation and the first years of independence (see note 13)—the
notions “young person” and “young generation” have spread over the past twenty
years as emic and etic, descriptive and analytical categories, as if they appeared to be
more adequate for conceiving of postcolonial situations and new dominations
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000: 109, 2005: 28). Far be it from us to want to wade into
those debates.18 We thought it was important to capture the circulation of the concepts
—nomadic concepts as Stengers (1987) and Bourdieu (2016) called them—that gravitate
around “youth” in Africa, a category in which all of the political and analytical tensions
running through contemporary African societies diffract each other. Its intelligibility
conditions the ability to define new subjects of research.
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45 It would take more than one article to particularise and untangle all of the instances of
“generation” mentioned above.19 For example, “historical generation” (covering the
Structural Adjustment generation by Mazzocchetti via Champy, the Soweto generation
by Gukelberger, the tichumera generation by Rasmussen, or Pontiggia’s generational
narratives in the present volume) does not exactly cover the cohort generations of
demographers and longitudinal analysis (Antoine et al., 2001), though it touches on
them. When it came to journalists and politicians, the various fathers of the nation and
others did not fail to understand the value of “being a generation” and cultivating the
generation as the “site of memory” (Nora, [1992] 1997; Arnaut, 2005; N’Guessan, 2015;
Gukelberger, present volume). Going back to the period of decolonisation, in Uganda
for example (Summers, 2010), the valence of “generation” seemed reversed: one spoke
of the “child population” and of the crisis of growth within the young generation of
that “adolescent population” (as populations acceding to independence were called), a
scenario that broadens the narrative of the “ages” of humanity characteristic of 19th-
century evolutionism. But generations exist in other institutional forms in Africa,
which can get tangled up with the imaginary young generations presented above: the
customary “generation” of East African generation-set systems (Peatrik, 2003b, present
volume; Marmone, present volume; Straight, present volume), the classificatory
“generation” of kinship terminology, and the genealogical “generation” underpinning
the filiation and primogeniture group through which we broached the question.
3. Young people as an age category
46 By viewing youth no longer as a relative position, but rather as one of the categories of
the ages of life, it becomes possible to decentre its meaning and attain another point of
view, that of the body (and the person): the question of its advancement over time, the
importance of designations and, at the same time, of delimitations. In short, and to get
straight to our argument: “youth” does not exist in the traditional repertoire of African
languages, and logically, neither does “young person” as an individual characterised by
the distinctive traits of youth. And when these terms come up, their presence is the
result of borrowing, usually from French or English. What is covered by what could
pass for a radical nominalism?
Categorisations
47 In Maa, the language of the Samburu people (Marmone, present volume; Straight,
present volume) and in Kimeru (Peatrik, present volume), there are no terms that
translate what Westerners understand by “child”, “youth” or “adult”. This also applies
to the Malinke people (Dessertine, present volume) and could be extended to the Wolof
people (Rabain, 2003), the Dogon people (Jolly, 2003) and the Guro people (Haxaire,
2003), among other examples in West Africa. This list is far from exhaustive. To
evaluate this, one would have to have access to all terms designating ages of life: for
men and for women. This would make it possible to correct the gender asymmetry
hitherto created by studies mostly examining boys and young men (Champy, present
volume). Nor should one neglect the names of each status group, when a given society
is made up of several of these groups.
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48 African societies and cultures have produced a number of age divisions and many scales
of the ages of life, and none of them directly represents what Westerners understand
by “young person” and “youth”. The divisions are or were different, and a wide variety
of systems were mobilised (and are still mobilised) by the delimitations, including the
most elaborate rituals, the most trivial gestures, countless territorial and residential
modalities (Wilson, 1951; Gabail, 2012; Dessertine, present volume; Iwilade, present
volume), the rich pallet of terms of reference and address, and the endless resources of
onomastics. These ways of doing things both reflect and implement ethnotheories
concerning ages and ontogeny, that is to say local representations of the evolution and
components of the person-body, from conception through development, aging and
death. The separation established by Marcel Mauss ([1936] 1968, [1938] 1968)—in a way
that was fortuitous but in tune with the Western body/person duality—is ineffective
here, and even creates an obstacle in the analysis of young people and of any other age
of life. One cannot explore the age of the body without talking about the person that it
incarnates, and reciprocally, a person’s age is inseparable from the state of their body.
This is a fundamental fact of the anthropology of the ages of life. The individual person,
whoever it might be, is wrought by the development of their body over time, a
development that is itself conditioned by the concrete existential modalities at work in
a society and culture at a particular moment in a given place. What is therefore
necessary is to define new analytical units based on the “person-body”, like the concept
“ontogenesis” (Peatrik, 2003a), transposed from biology and reworked to integrate a
cultural component.
49 Broadly speaking, the developmental curve of the human being (Homo sapiens) is the
same everywhere, but in the abundance of actually existing societies, the very wide
variety of systems make it evident that there is a close link between the definition of
ages and the nature of the society, culture or historical period under consideration.
Thus the developmental curve of the human being—whose distinctive feature is the
child’s long dependence on adults (which in evolutionary terms could be the root of the
lengthening human lifespan and the appearance of grandparents)—is particularly
influenced by food and health contexts. The progress of puberty is a good example of
this conditioning. The phenomenon is well-known, but all of its components remain
insufficiently analysed: in girls, menstruation begins increasingly early (for some more
than others), whereas boys’ puberty is subject to less variation. Has anyone assessed
the consequences of this global tendency proven in Africa, where it is spoken of by
elders?20 The phenomenon has been observed for a long time, and it is amusing to recall
that Van Gennep ([1909] 198: 93–125) made the wide variation in signs of puberty one
of the tools for analysing its rites of passage, described over a century ago. The
manifestations and real or assumed causes of this variability lie at the foundation of the
anthropology of youth, and the observation obviously applies to Africa and the rest of
the world.
50 In this entry by means of age categories (which is one of many approaches we could
have taken), we will more particularly consider the question of the characterisation of
the “young” person and the question of age limits.
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Young people and youth cultures
51 We should take a moment to look at the distinctive traits of “youth” and more deeply
explore the theme that Ivorian sociologists G. Koné et al. (2017) outlined with a certain
humour in their article on young people and land in the south-west Ivory Coast:
We would point out that, in an emic way, we are rooting the concept of “young
person” in the context in our study in Neyo country. To put it plainly, in Neyo
country, the term “young” is defined in contrast to that of “old”. It refers to
generations that, because of their state of health and their athletic abilities, can
handle the deployment of physical energy needed for the long walks often
organised through the village territories, particularly for the purpose of
demarcating their boundaries. The concept “old people” or “elders” refers to
generations said to be tired because they can no longer travel. In this register,
every Neyo is attributed the status “young” (regardless of their biological age) as
long as they are capable of doing these exercises (2017: 69).
52 Between a person-body conception and ontology, this characterisation of youth is
reminiscent of the qualities required in farm work contests among the Senufo people of
the northern Ivory Coast studied by Marianne Lemaire (2009). The winners among the
young men quintessentially embody constitutive strength in those villages of valiant
farmers. Or the characterisation evokes the Soninke people (Gaibazzi via Champy,
present volume), who valorise “calloused hands” and mastery of farming activities,
which is considered fundamental to young people’s fulfilment and the maturing of
their sense of responsibility. This echoes the definition of “young” in another rural
world, that of Madagascar: “Being young [tanora], means having the strength to work
the land!” Tanora is a state that follows the age of pre-pubescent childhood (zaza) and
precedes that of the elders, “fathers and mothers” (raiamandreny) (Burnod et al., 2016).
In a more ideological vein, and as a political resource serving their land claims, one
thinks of Bété young people returning to the countryside (Montaz, present volume)
who, in their membership in youth societies, claim to adhere to an ideal of
participation in collective farm work. But this celebration of youthful energy through
engagement in work can turn into its opposite when children and young people placed
in apprenticeships are exploited by artisans and elders who abuse their position as
superiors (Viti, 2005, 2018; Agbu, 2009).
53 In East-African societies, which are more conditioned by the pastoral economy, “youth”
would conjure up the questionable valorisation of livestock raids conducted by
“circumcised warriors”, at the instigation of young women, their lovers, in line with
nefarious images co-constructed during the colonial era and marked by the
prudishness of Victorian morality, linking seduction with incitement to violence
(Straight, present volume).
54 On a darker level, one that is implicit and rarely questioned, we should turn our
attention to the qualities attributed to “children” who are very early involved in the
household economy, some of whom have been forced to become child combatants. As
Honwana (2006: 41, 52) furtively mentions: “In Angola and Mozambique, as in many
other contexts, children are often portrayed as strong and resilient, as survivors who
grow in difficult conditions”, letting it be understood that these qualities are not
unconnected with the children’s unscrupulous enlistment by warlords under an
initiatory guise (ibid.: 49–74). Would the strength and resilience attributed to children
and young people also be related to their supposed ability to withstand pain and
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 47 | 2020Towards an anthropology of youth in Africa 15
corporal punishment (Last, 2000; Archambault, 2009; Ocobock, 2012; Peatrik, present
volume)? Then what is one to think of situations in which resistance to inflicted ordeals
is dressed up as purgative and formative—in short, as certain initiatory processes?
What faults and flaws are violence and suffering supposed to correct among novices? At
the heart of the institution, what is at stake is precisely the ability to master the degree
of violence inflicted by initiators, in order not to fail in transition and metamorphosis.
When it becomes initiatory, violence has many facets, but all of them sound out the
characteristics considered inherent to the novice’s person-body. 21
55 In the contemporary urban world, age categories and their distinctive qualities are
shaped more in the course of individual and linguistic interactions. From these
everyday verbal and nonverbal kinds of rhetoric—performed on occasions and in places
that vary widely—emerge characterising prototypes and clichés, stigmatising or
valorising shifters, which lie at the heart of the fabrication of ages and youth: in them,
behaviours are commented upon, and models or injunctions to conform to expectations
are stated (Masquelier and Siran, 2000; Durham, 2004).
56 Regarding gangs (from Colombia to Port Harcourt), Iwilade (present volume) shows
how two antagonistic representations—“being young” versus “being youth”—shape
existences within youthscapes22 in which powers confront one another and construct
themselves. In this context, “being young” means being less than nothing: a passive,
dominated cadet who “isn’t one of them”, who “doesn’t belong” to gangs and militias.
In reality, those who aren’t one of them—“Jew men” and “angels”—represent the great
majority of young men, while only a fraction of them qualify as “being youth”, in the
sense of acting like a young person, overdoing virile violence, “being one of them”,
belonging to a group, almost having a status (an acquired status that is almost an age
status) and thereby accessing networks in the illegal economy. There, “playing at
youth” has become a resource, a situation reminiscent of the Nouchi culture claimed by
disadvantaged urban young people in Abidjan (Newell via Champy, present volume),
and also reminiscent of the “being-youth” trajectory recounted by Lamaison-Boltanski
(present volume) in Burkina Faso: that of social outcasts who, after being proud
paragons of irresponsible youth, transformed themselves into spearheads of an
exemplary youth driven by an energy placed in the service of everyone.
57 In all of these cases, the “youth culture” of those young men (some of whom are
pushing 40) is fed by the transnational circulation of music and images (on a wide
variety of mediums), which are closely woven into local values, as B. Weiss (2009)
showed with regard to the sociability of barber stalls in Tanzania. To broaden the
sociological spectrum of images of youth, we could mention the young urban figures
sketched by caricaturists in the Kenyan national press, as studied by Georges Ogola
(2006). Some very famous ones portray the troubles of modern parents and the way
young people from the new middle classes behave: a girl is called “The Investment” in
the sense of a future resource—and also called “bridewealth” in academic parlance—
because the more qualified a girl is, the more she is valorised in the matrimonial field;
her brother, called “Whispers Jr.”, prefers to nickname himself “Ras Whispero” in the
Rasta style, and defends his right to wear dreadlocks and play the “rude boy”, which is
all about defying parents seeking honourability (Lamaison-Boltanski, present volume).
58 An analysis exploring the abundant representations of youth, as well as the
productions of “youth cultures” that explicitly convey images of youth, could generate
enough material for a whole chapter, or even a book. The study of “youth subcultures”,
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