Engaging Postcolonial Cultures: African Youth and Public Space

Abstract:

The violent irruption of African youth into the public and domestic spheres seems to have resulted in the construction of their behavior as a threat, and to have provoked, within society as a whole, a panic that is simultaneously moral and civic. At issue are the bodies of young people and their behavior, which escape the constraints of social construction, their sexuality and pleasure, as well as the formulas of their action and presence as junior social actors. The new situation has consequences for several issues, the most important of which are the redefinition of the relationships between identity and citizenship in the whirlwind of globalization, the metamorphoses of the processes of socialization, the production of new forms of inequality accompanied by their own representations and imaginations, and the extraordinary mutation of the chronological and psychological constructions of the passage from youth to adulthood.

Résumé: La violente irruption de la jeunesse africaine dans les sphères publiques et domestiques semble avoir eu pour conséquence la construction de leur cornportement comme menace, et semble avoir provoqué dans l'ensemble de la société une panique à la fois morale et civique. Les arguments invoqués sont les corps des jeunes gens et leur comportement, qui échappent aux contraintes de la construction sociale; leur sexualité et leur plaisir; ainsi que les codes régissant leurs actions et leur présence en tant que jeunes acteurs sociaux. Cette nouvelle situation a des conséquences dans plusieurs domaines, les plus importants d'entre eux étant la redéfinition des relations entre identité et citoyenneté, prises dans le tourbillon de la globalisation; les métamorphoses des processus de socialisation; la production de nouvelles formes d'inégalité, accompagnées de leurs représentations et de leur imaginaire spécifiques; et l'extraordinaire mutation des constructions chronologiques et psychologiques du passage de la jeunesse à l'âge adulte.

Introduction

Today, young people are emerging as one of the central concerns of African studies. Located at the heart of both analytical apparatuses and political action, they also have become a preoccupation of politicians, social workers, and communities in Africa. Undoubtedly, the centrality of this subject is connected to the extraordinary turnaround over the last three decades in the way African societies see themselves.

Since the end of World War II, the basic objects of research on and explanations of African societies and the condition of Africans have been the state, rural populations, and the processes of the authoritarian and/or democratic construction of political systems. This interest has been focused over the past decade on the deepening economic and financial crisis, the jolts occurring in efforts at democratization, and the political ruptures that began on the continent at the end of the 1980s. In general, Africa has been understood in terms of a triple crisis involving the family, the nation, and the state. At the level of the family, dramatic changes have come about in terms of gender roles and the distribution of responsibility. Just as men are no longer expected to be the sole economic providers for the family, they are no longer the sole authority. This transformation, in turn, has made women more visible in the public sphere, a development that has been influenced by the globalization of desires and expectations. At the level of the nation, international institutions and money lenders have challenged the development paradigm that encouraged privatization of African economies, including national appropriation of resources and the means of production. At the level of the state, the focus has been on the difficult processes of institutional and political stabilization which virtually all countries face.

Several factors seem to have been involved in the increased focus on youth in particular. First of all, in contrast to the demographic situation in developed countries, where declining birth rates have led to a decreasing proportion of young people, the youthful population of Africa has been growing. Young people now constitute the majority of the African population, and their integration into society, in terms of both civic responsibility and membership, has had enormous economic, cultural, political, and social consequences.1 At the same time, the condition of young people in Africa, as well as their future, is heavily influenced by the interaction between local and global pressures: the fragmentation or dissolution of local culture and memory, on the one hand, and the influences of global culture, on the other. Like the demographic changes, this conflict has religious, esthetic, cultural, political, and economic consequences. Particularly in light of the failure of the nationalist political enterprise, which had set itself the double objective of economic development and social justice, African societies increasingly are looking to young people as instruments of change. The sense that they are uniquely positioned to speak a language of both universal rights and specific African cultures has led to continual redefinitions of their role in the social sphere.