youth and citizenship in east africa || introduction to youth and citizenship in east africa

Introduction to Youth and Citizenship in East AfricaAuthor(s): Thomas BurgessSource: Africa Today, Vol. 51, No. 3, Youth and Citizenship in East Africa (Spring, 2005), pp.vii-xxivPublished by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187665 .

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Introduction to Youth and Citizenship in East Africa Thomas Burgess

Generation in Africa has recently attracted considerable and perhaps unprecedented scholarly interest. In the last four years four major institutions have hosted international conferences on youth in Africa (Social Science Research Council, University of Leiden, Northwestern University, and Amherst College), and, at last report, at least three intended to publish volumes of essays on the subject. In 2002 the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) began its Child and Youth Studies Institute. In 2003 the African Studies Association (ASA) made "Youthful Africa in the 21st Century" its annual meeting's unifying theme. According to my count, the conference hosted ten roundtable discussions and 160 presentations that examined various topics and issues related to youth in Africa. If only a fraction of these presentations make it to print, the African Studies community will have more to digest about generation than it has in a long time.

A few reasons could be cited. In terms of demography, youth are hardly insignificant in Africa, given the continent's historically high over- all birthrate and youthful population. Nor is the label extremely exclusive, with definitions of "youth" shifting from one locality to the next. On a very obvious level, youth are located at the center of Africa's opportunities, challenges and crises of the early twenty-first century, so it is not a stretch for researchers to identify some of the agents who appear in their work as "youth." The ASA called for papers concerning the relationship between youth and urban space, democracy, the study of philosophy and religion, environmental change, economic development, the African Diaspora, resistance to colonialism and imperialism, rural development, visual culture, health issues, gender, information technologies, popular culture, African literature, education, and grassroots activism. Given the presence of young people in so many African cultural, political, and economic endeavors, and in consideration of the category's indeterminate quality, it is possible to elicit scholarly participation on a large scale.

It is more difficult, however, to work toward a set of common scholarly understandings about youth and generation that are neither banal nor easily assailable. How can youth be defined? How is the category constructed? Is youth a primary or secondary identity? Are young people to be known as "youth," or by some other name? What is the relationship of youth not



only with their elders, but with women, workers, farmers, colonial officials, and the postcolonial state? Do youth share certain interests and distinct characteristics as a stage in the life cycle? Do we simply note the youthfulness of local actors, without investing theoretical energy or ascribing any importance to their age? The best writing on youth to emerge in recent years has not only described how they are engaged in cultural production, a struggle for survival, social movements or political conflicts. It has also assisted in the effort to relieve at least some of the category's indeterminacy, without ignoring generation's essentially fluid and liminal quality. Youth is not always a homogeneous, discrete or bounded category. Generation lacks the demographic precision of gender, and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity. Nor do generations appear to always share the same material interests. Youthful status varies widely according to time and place; it tends to emerge out of local idioms and languages, and is lost or gained through the aging process and a variety of personal decisions and life events. Often invisible to cen- suses and maps, youth consists of a constantly shifting population moving in and out of locally determined notions of youthfulness.

Nor has generation in Africa been codified; the absence of any canon- ized script or normative theoretical guidelines to which scholars may refer has, until now, discouraged both research and debate, particularly among historians. Generation cannot boast of possessing "master terms" like "exploitation" (Feuer 1972:365-366). As Mark Roseman observes about generation in German history, "Generations have always seemed rather flimsy craft compared with the sturdy steamships of social class. . . . The historian of generations cannot have recourse to the same well-rehearsed set of understandings" (1995:3-5). Such contingency has encouraged scholarly reticence, particularly in comparison to the "holy trinity" of race, class, and gender that dominated analysis of social identity in the 1980s and beyond, and which appeared-and often continues to appear-far more explicit. Some who have assumed that all social categories either possess a series of transparent and rational group interests, or whose essential homo- geneity produces an easily explicable pattern of group behavior, have had difficulties accepting generation as merely "a cultural label, a projection or repository" (Roseman 1995:9). Historians were unwilling to ascribe importance to the label until recently. With the intelligibility of youth agency in doubt, generation served as an ambiguous and obscure reference point on historiographical maps.

Beginning in the 1 990s, however, some scholars called for a more open analytical framework. Achille Mbembe observed that "the postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation [that] multi- plied, transformed, and put into circulation" various identities (2001:102).1 Scholars began to take another look at a social category that functionalist anthropologists previously awarded prominent attention through classic monographs on age-grades and age-sets in rural societies. Generation began to reemerge as a category considered key to understanding the construction of social knowledge and power relations in Africa (Aguilar 1998:6-7). John

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Iliffe in 1995 made the noteworthy claim that "conflict between male generations [has been] one of the most dynamic and enduring forces in African history" (1995:95). As evidenced by the run of conferences in recent years, scholars are more willing now to recognize the currency of generational categories, yet certain questions remain. As Jon Abbink notes, much of the literature to emerge recently has foregrounded the contemporary "youth crisis," the key ingredients of which include the spread of HIV/AIDS, population growth that has produced an unprecedented demographic imbalance, massive unemployment, and political turmoil. Young people are especially vulnerable; "to be young in Africa [has come] to mean being disadvantaged, vulnerable and marginal in the political and economic sense" (2005:7). Youth are too often victims of a "faulty modernization" (2005:5) and too easily join criminal fraternities and rebel armies in order to escape "conditions of poverty, idleness or ennui" (2005:3).

While the importance of youth as a social category seems beyond dispute, certain questions remain. In a 1996 essay, Donal Cruise O'Brien remarked that the study of youth is a "challenging research agenda" since youth may be defined through multiple terms, and represent a category of "temporary subversives" (1996:55). They are merely a "potential or epi- sodic oppositional coalition" (1996:67-68). Given its often unstable and contingent nature, should generation even be considered an identity? This question hinges on how the term "identity" is applied, or misapplied. As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper cogently observe, language in the social sciences too often reduces "identity" to "little more than a sugges- tive oxymoron" (2000:34). Identity is called upon to perform contradictory analytical functions: it possesses both "soft" and "hard" meanings. The difference is between categories that are fluid and improvised, and those that are bounded and possess a fundamental sameness (2000:9). Too often, they argue, such incompatible usages render identity a hopelessly ambiguous term (2000:6). The language of identity frequently "blurs what needs to be kept distinct," such as "objective commonality and subjective groupness" (2000:27). "These usages are not simply heterogeneous; they point in sharply differing directions" (2000:8).2 These insights seem particularly relevant at a time when scholars are beginning to foreground generation, yet have not evolved a set of common understandings about the term. In light of Brubaker and Cooper's compelling case for the irredeemable ambiguity of identity, I propose generation be called by other names, such as category and label. This would serve to undermine what the two authors refer to as the "con- ceptually impoverished identitarian sociology" so "powerful in American academia in the 1990s," in which "the 'intersection' of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and perhaps one or two other categories generates a set of all-purpose conceptual boxes" (2000:31).

In twentieth-century East Africa, generation constituted a hard and a soft conceptual category, both an "ancient" and a temporary cultural label. Youth appeared as a recognized phase in the life cycle, carefully framed and enshrined by a continuous cycle of public rituals, and possessing a

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host of well-established understandings regarding its characteristics and functions within the community. In such communities a high value was placed on age, continuity, reproduction, and security. Where discontinuity was more decisive, however, youth emerged less as a phase in the life cycle but as an historical cohort. Youth were defined less by a set of inherited discursive constructs as by unique historical circumstances and narratives that set their generation apart from others before or after, and that allowed a greater degree of negotiation, flux, and invention. This essential duality between hard and soft labels needs to be recognized in reference to the history of generation before, during and after colonialism. A vast anthro- pological literature has emphasized youth as an "ancient" category, and has asserted that generation in East Africa to varying extents determined men's access to authority, status, women, and ritual power. The reverse was also true: distinctions in male society between autonomy and dependency were expressed locally through generation. It was normal for age to "assume a preeminent role as a principle of social structure"3 (Bernardi 1985:2). Gen- eration embodied a series of rankings based upon age, each rank possessing a high degree of affinity and connectedness. Male initiation rites provided instruction that commonly reinforced age-deference as a principle neces- sary for communal cohesion. Despite enforcing strict social and economic hierarchies, generational discourse could also ensure reciprocity. While such systems institutionalized stratification, they also promised even- tual advance. Public ceremonies formally transferred power between the generations and granted corporate mobility and promotion; they also gave generational antagonisms, not in the least uncommon in these systems, an acceptable and controlled public expression (Gulliver 1963; Moore and Purritt 1977; Raum 1940; Wilson 1959).4

Formal age grades that hinged upon corporate social promotion were most common in East Africa among pastoralist societies, yet they were widely imitated by neighboring peoples. In these societies, "every class member is invested with a definite capacity to act socially and enters the line of class promotion. Every class member is aware of what his status and capacity are at a definite moment and is conscious of the rights of his class in relation to other classes" (Bernardi 1985:29-30). Women were also sometimes active in forming their own age associations to protect their rights in their relations with men. Although women's age associations obeyed "the same mechanisms as their male counterparts," they did not "form a coher- ent system in themselves. They [did] not have the neatly balanced pairs that can unite people and split them according to a mechanism of complemen- tary opposition. Their principal reference [was] the male system" (Kurimoto and Simonse 1998:19).

In most agrarian societies, however, social promotion was achieved individually through the institution of marriage. Marriage became a center for conflicts as sons struggled to gain access to wives in order to hasten their entrance to adulthood. Junior-senior conflicts over access to cattle, women, and land were complicated by female agency. All-male generational

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disputes were sometimes forgotten when women sought to renegotiate their rights as wives and daughters. Junior and senior men formed alliances when their control over wives and daughters was threatened (Lovett 1996).5 Thus if Marx defined classes according to their access to modes of production, anthropologists have repeatedly described how, despite endless local varia- tions, access to women and reproduction determined men's generational status (Geschiere 1982). For this reason it cannot be maintained in Africa that generation is a term ungrounded in material realities or without distinct boundaries. The manner in which juniors in Africa have historically been cast as clients in relation to their elders has been as real as class divisions between workers and capitalists in Europe.6 Bernardo Bernardi's employment of the term "age class systems" suggests to what extent in Africa it is possible in some circumstances to conflate the two labels.7

Gerontocratic discourses endured throughout the century and were not frozen in time. They were subject to revision and adaptation according to changing political and economic conditions. Whether formal or informal, generational hierarchies were most sustainable during periods of security and social stability; in conditions of war, natural catastrophe, or social crisis, age corresponded less and less with generation, inheritances were postponed or lost completely, and junior status extended indefinitely. Such delays undermined the capacity of the old "to manipulate knowledge and re-invent tradition" (Aguilar 1998:24) and encouraged juniors to look for exit options, alternative ways of advancing their status beyond dependence on their seniors. As Meredith McKittrick observes, the emergence of a sizable group of older men without cattle, land, or access to women, "undermined the ideological controls inherent in ideas of generation by challenging the conventional wisdom that young people who played by the rules would one day become seniors themselves" (2002:13).

Colonial rule, Christianity, capitalism, urbanization, nationalism, and independence infinitely complicated relations between youth and elders. If gerontocratic discourse affirmed that youth was a liminal stage between childhood and adulthood, and between dependence and autonomy, the category came in the colonial period to exist in a very general sense somewhere between village and town, "tradition" and modernity. Accord- ing to Frederick Cooper, "modernization entailed a package, a series of co-varying changes, from subsistence to market economies, from subject to participant political culture, from ascriptive status systems to achieve- ment status systems, from extended to nuclear kinship, from religious to secular ideology" (1997:81-82). For many Africans, their colonial journeys compelled an encounter with at least selected elements of the modernist package. When such immersion coincided with their transition from juniors to seniors, it was not accidental that youth came to possess conflicted associations with modernity and all of its attendant blessings and ills. Modern- ization thus undermined the categorical stability of relatively well-defined notions of youth in agrarian and pastoralist societies. In the new era, young people reevaluated their roles, rights and duties in society, in reference to

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accepted wisdom and the texture of public rituals, as well as a new set of social and economic relationships of unique colonial provenance. Young people gained the analytical distance to question the validity and universal- ity of gerontocratic discourse; their participation in school, wage labor, religious congregations, and city life suggested that superior age was no longer tantamount to specialized knowledge, wealth, or ritual power.

However, by 1998 Aguilar observed that "the complexity of matura- tion in urban centers . . . needs yet to be untangled." This was a "particular area absent from the literature" (1998:18-19). Historians can perform important research by asking to what extent urbanization, Christianity, and capitalism encouraged youth to reconsider their primary responsibilities and to construct new meanings for generation. They can investigate the articulation in colonial and postcolonial practice of African ideas of generation of precolonial origins. They can ask how younger Africans negotiated between discourses of power based upon clientage and patriarchy and the range of discourses concerning citizenship that have emerged in Africa over the past century. They can examine the evolution among youth in the twentieth century of new affinities and the crystallization of newer forms of commonality than those considered acceptable in gerontocratic society. Such group ties were usually no longer hard but soft, fluid and less discrete. Youth was no longer a taxonomical label that emphasized youth as a fixed rank and entity, but a category that often coincided with a "narrative the- matic" (Somers 1994:634). Margaret Somers observes that as individuals "selectively appropriate the happenings of the social world, arrange them in some order, and normatively evaluate these arrangements" (Somers 1994:617), they locate themselves within a limited repertoire of historical narratives, which positioning determines how social actors adopt labels, however multiple or conflicting they may be.

During colonialism, the inherited narrative of a life cycle in which young people who observed social conventions and deferred to their seniors would attain autonomy and prestige now competed with multiple narratives in which seniority was no longer celebrated so much as youthfulness. The experience of young people in a range of colonial institutions and environ- ments undermined associations between seniority and status. New relations produced new knowledge, skills, and attitudes. As they distanced themselves from networks that defined juniors as subjects of their seniors, young people came to support and to elaborate a discourse of rights that came to challenge both patriarchy and the colonial state. Benedict Carton found that as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, Zulu elders "spoke wistfully of a gilded age when youths and young wives were deferential" (2000:10). New access to wage labor gave young men leverage to negotiate the terms of "customary relations at home, especially with respect to personal freedom in work, play, and courtship" (2000:136). Juniors possessed an exit option from years of servitude to their seniors, or at least the choice between different forms of servitude, however these were unintended con- sequences. Colonial laws tended to reinforce patriarchal authority, even to

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the extent of unevenly punishing youth who did not turn over their wages to their fathers (2000:50). Carton concludes that Bhambatha's rebellion in the Thukela basin in 1906 was not about Africans resisting their proletarianization, as earlier scholars such as Shula Marks have claimed, but about younger Africans embracing proletarianization as a means by which to attain social mobility and autonomy from their seniors (2000:6-7, 138).

As the significance and agency of youth in various contemporary crises becomes known, historians need to historicize the study of youth, and the essays in this issue of Africa Today are one effort in this direction. In contrast to emphases on youth deviance, violence, and criminality, these essays offer images of youth as idealistic intellectuals, Boy Scouts, and peace-loving urban entrepreneurs who take their social philosophy from the lyrics of Bob Marley songs. In every study that follows, young people in one way or another are seeking to define their rights and obligations as both subjects and citizens. They either conform to or challenge standards imposed by a clan hierarchy, a nationalist regime, or a world empire.

Carol Summers describes an emerging contest in Buganda in the 1920s through the 1940s between the "old" politics of patriarchy, patronage, and "tradition," and new politics based upon "ideas of popular participation, democracy, and scholastically-based merit." While colonial officials and missionaries cultivated a second generation of African political leaders and converts, they worried over the implications of this transition, and a possible youth crisis. Governor Philip Mitchell in 1938 called for an "aristocracy of culture" in the Protectorate based wholly upon merit and educational attain- ment, rather than blood or ancestry. He and his successors began to Afri- canize the civil administration, opened up new avenues of responsibility and employment to an emerging generation of western-educated Africans, and retired members of the old Ganda elite. Meanwhile, a rising generation of Ganda intellectuals such as Henry Kanyike, Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka, Semakula Mulumba, E.M.K. Mulira, and Yusufu Bamuta invoked a new kind of political legitimacy based upon youth. Bamuta, for example, claimed the Ganda political hierarchy was incompetent and senile. Mulira criticized chiefs who had failed to distinguish themselves academically, and who abused their positions of power to acquire wealth and followers. Despite considerable diversity in terms of their career paths and political perspec- tives, Summers observes these intellectuals generally opposed the "classical Ganda pedagogy" that emphasized "elaborate tutelage in deference, manners and obedience." They instead promoted a new kind of citizenship based upon "youthful, savvy, cosmopolitan" leadership generated through the colonial school system.

Bayart's description of how "the period of the whites became one of insolence, where 'children' 'with fire in their belly' broke their silence," (Bayart 1993:113-114) is demonstrated in Summers' essay. In this context youth came not only to embody a distinct stage in the life cycle, but a generation undergoing unique historical circumstances that gave the label new and shifting associations. In his study of the effects of capitalist penetration

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among the Giriama of Kenya, David Parkin argues "youth" became synony- mous with money and social independence (Parkin 1972). Makonde elders in Tanganyika in the 1950s lamented that young migrant laborers had "lost all their manners. They are too proud" (Liebenow 1971:231). When they return from plantation work they "feel they are much smarter than the rest of the people and are constantly criticizing the elders and saying disrespectful things to them. ...Since they can get work outside the village, they tell us they can leave whenever we try to bring them into line"(l971:160). Western education introduced new skills and concepts that profoundly undermined established values. Mission Christianity fed off generational tensions: the new faith promised the young redemption not only from sin, but freedom from the blessings and curses of the ancestors and older generations (Fadi- man 1993:175-254). McKittrick adds that young people gravitated toward Christianity and migrant labor in search of security as well as autonomy. About Namibian history she writes, "young people sought refuge not within the familiar but within the exotic-a new matrix of goods, ideas, relationships, and magic that accompanied missionaries into the floodplain." The language of Christianity (redemption, salvation and safety) was a "language of protection" (2002:4). She notes that while it is practically a clich6 to observe that women and youths comprised the large majority of Christi- anity's earliest converts, "the reason for their prevalence, especially in the case of youths, has rarely been investigated" (2002:10).

A new kind of social autonomy among young people also drew considerable comment among British officials deeply concerned with "detribalization." They defined the moral order of the towns as inferior to that of the villages, and worried over the potential emergence of an urban crowd of materialistic, consumption-oriented youth with little respect for their seniors or the laws of the land. The very presence of underemployed young African men, no longer considered "tribal," nor yet worthy of urban respectability, was seen as a contamination of the disciplined and ordered municipal environment the colonials sought to create. Officials and some African elders separated youth into two categories, depending on their perceived success in embracing modernity: useful, disciplined youth and their disorderly, loafing, and criminal cohorts. These two categories formed an historical dialectic in East Africa during the 1950s, and embodied the hopes and anxieties of officials attempting to control the process of modernization, and to either resolve or ignore its contradictions (Burgess 2001). The youthful "hooligan" became literally a purge category, as the colonial state, at least in Tanganyika, organized campaigns to expel and repatriate loitering young men from the city to their home areas (Burgess 2001; Burton 2001, forthcoming).

It also became common for the British to correlate youth, the city, and nationalism, and to construe willingness to question the authority of seniors as a willingness also to challenge the legitimacy of colonialism. This was actually no fantasy: nationalist movements were quick to invoke generational categories and to call into official existence youth as one

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of several privileged agents, each with uncompleted historical tasks and responsibilities to fulfill. They did not hesitate to employ labels arranged by their own imagination and subjective reading of history. By introducing key terms, founding new associations, provoking local debate, articulat- ing aspirations, referring to a common heritage, or identifying common enemies, nationalists employed categories that were both substantive and ephemeral, but which attained at least a passing public reality. They sought to mobilize coalitions in either support or rejection of "natural" principles of patriarchy and clientalism. At times they appropriated historical memories of generational deference in order to cement party unity and to distribute institutional power and responsibilities. Youth served in nationalist associations in order to earn merit through which to obtain patronage from their seniors. At other times nationalists put young men firmly in charge. When Julius Nyerere addressed the Mombasa African Democratic Union in Janu- ary 1958 he advised Kenyan nationalists to divide their organizations "into sections containing elderly members, young members, and women, and to ensure that the control and leadership were retained by the young men, who were more progressive, energetic, and prepared to take greater risks" (Burgess 2001). Nationalism could thus be a means for youth to challenge the authority of elders; youth at midcentury were keenly aware of the opportunities of a moment "of considerable mobility and category jumping" (Cooper 1994:1519). They constructed new meanings for youth according to where they located themselves in terms of the multiple intersecting narratives of their times. Their role in nationalist mobilization can also be seen as part of their ongoing struggle to make claims on adulthood, urban citizenship, or as an assertion of their masculinity. John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman argued that a correspondence in a male Kikuyu moral economy between land, wealth, virtue, and adulthood was at the heart of the "moral and intellectual" context of Mau Mau (Lonsdale and Berman 1992:326-327). Youth seeking manhood took to the forests more readily than their elders as a form of resistance to an alien power that most inhibited their social mobility. Bethwell Ogot has argued the Mau Mau conflict between Kikuyu guerillas and loyalists was drawn at least partially along lines of generation (1972).8

Nationalist youth also sought to advance various visions of a New Africa, in the creation of which they believed their generation was endowed by history to perform a vanguard role. This was the case in Zanzibar, when an unusually large cohort of students gained access to tertiary institutions in the socialist world, and returned to the islands with elevated notions of the role they were to play in nationalism and nation building. Not from any specific ethnic or class background, this heterogeneous cohort's enthusiastic embrace of youth and socialist labels may be taken as an example of the narrative construction of identity. Selectively evaluating their lived experiences according to a series of socialist discourses from overseas about which they could claim specialized knowledge, they located themselves in a global narrative premised on the claim that socialism was historically inevitable, was about to be adopted by the planet's most progressive communities, and that

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youth were to play the role of universal agents of an equally universal progress (Burgess 2005). They were "substitute proletarians" (Riviere 1977:230), compelled by their times and their travels to pull Zanzibar into the transnational march toward socialism. In many cases members of this cohort did not, in the Zanzibari Revolution, act according to their own personal rational interests, since some were of privileged backgrounds, but according to who they thought they were, or where they located themselves in terms of a global historical narrative. Emblems of the post-war African student diaspora, they were about as far removed as anyone of their generation from the claims of clientage and patriarchy (Burgess 2005).

British officials employed various strategies to maintain control over their territories' youthful ranks, including expelling undesirable young men from townships, or encouraging "rational recreation" through youth associations such as soccer teams and the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts were designed to promote fraternity and discipline, and as Tim Parsons in this issue suggests, to inculcate among African youth specific notions of "imperial citizenship," or respect for both colonial and chiefly authorities. In his reconstruction of the history of the Boy Scouts in Kenya during that nation's transition to independence, Parsons observes the dramatic decline of membership in the scouts during an era when African nationalism encouraged many Kenyan youth to reconsider their participation in overtly colonial institutions. By the 1960s officials came to the conclusion that attempting to instill imperial citizenship among African youth was unrealistic. The state reduced its financial support for the Kenya Boy Scout Association and shifted its attention to the process of decolonization. The metropolitan leaders of the Boy Scout Association, over considerable local white opposition, then pushed for the Africanization of the scouts in Kenya, as well as the redesign of badges and symbols along more nationalistic lines. By the mid- 1960s membership in the scouts had recovered to the levels of the 1950s, as Africans continued to value the association's emphasis on discipline, loyalty and self-respect. By reinventing its lessons and symbols to support national and not imperial citizenship, the scouts survived in postcolonial Kenya as "a force for national and economic development."

If imperial citizenship as fostered by the Boy Scouts sought to reinforce youthful deference to colonial officials and African seniors, then nationalists also asserted notions of citizenship after independence that upheld patriarchal values. They married these concepts, at least in Tanzania, to socialist discourse and a new development imperative that expanded the number of categories and stereotypes considered unworthy of citizenship and to potentially be purged from the city and the nation. According to James Brennan, citizenship in Nyerere's Tanzania was defined positively as an African worker or farmer "who not only refrained from but also fought exploitation" (Brennan, forthcoming). Defined negatively, full citizenship did not extend to various categories of "exploiters," who through their alleged laziness, criminality, licentiousness, or capitalist stratagems were guilty of parasitism. These most notably included "immodest" women,

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South Asians, and youthful hooligans (wahuni in Swahili), a holdover category from colonial days. Brennan asserts, "The nationalist elabora- tion of unyonyaji [exploitation] bridged local understandings of extraction with international socialist prescriptions for economic justice, and enabled the TANU state to signify who belonged to the new nation and, more importantly, who did not" (Brennan, forthcoming).

The call to citizens to refrain from and fight exploitation translated in practice as sometimes periodic, sometimes systematic demands on young people in particular to "build the nation." If the primary metaphor for President Julius Nyerere's version of socialism in Tanzania was the family, then youth were theoretically obligated to serve their nationalist elders as readily as their parents or village elders. Nationalist elders commanded youth to prove their worthiness of inclusion in the national family through demonstrations of sacrifice, "voluntary" labor, or through participation in nationalist rituals. Nationalist citizenship therefore embodied a series of expectations that potentially made membership in categories such as "farmer" and "worker" no longer automatic; they were no longer ones simply of belonging, but of becoming. Nationalists appropriated the language of gerontocracy to mobilize youth for nationbuilding tasks, despite that language's origins in economies that were fundamentally redistribu- tional, rather than in the model of a "developing economy" experiencing ever-increasing productivity. In this context young people were obliged to consider whether or not their displays of commitment would be sincere or purely instrumental, and to what extent the prosperous nationalist elite could legitimately and appropriately clothe themselves in the sacred mantle of the ancestors.

In this issue, Thomas Burgess and Andrew Ivaska examine this problematic. Burgess explores the rise and fall of the Young Pioneers-a socialist version of the Boy Scouts-in revolutionary Zanzibar. Emerging directly from Eastern European expertise in the "science" of youth development, the Young Pioneers sought to create a new kind of citizen, and to inculcate a conception of work and productivity as essential for fulfillment in life. Training in the Pioneers included repetitive historical lessons that praised revolutionary elders for the liberation of the islands from colonialism and capitalism, and calls to young people to fulfill their historic task of building the new nation. They could do so through a host of activities including parades and labor assignments; whatever the task or exercise, the emphasis was on performance of the rituals of a new revolutionary culture. These rituals provided visual proof of good citizenship and at least temporary conformity to the ruling agenda of the state. The synchronized movements and efficient bodily gestures of a Young Pioneer parade or labor battalion were considered compelling evidence of the discipline of the islands' youngest citizens, and their increasing utility to the state. The Young Pioneers provoked their share of indifference and desertion, particularly among Zanzi- bari families who supported the losing side of the revolution in 1964. Archi- val and oral evidence suggests, however, limited compliance and popular

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participation in what for many years was an essential avenue toward the acquisition of official patronage and, aside from sports teams, the only legal youth association in the islands.

Andrew Ivaska's essay examines an historically important and rather unusual confrontation in 1966 between students attending the University College in Dar es Salaam and Nyerere's government over the passage of a new bill through parliament that required two years of "national service" of all college and university graduates. As was true in Zanzibar, nationalist elites invoked generational discourse to elicit deference and service among a privileged and upwardly mobile cohort of student intellectuals. Instead of the silent refusals and secret desertions of island youth, the university students tested the limits of their elders' tolerance by conducting a vocifer- ous letters-to-the-editor campaign. They questioned the right of political elites to call upon youth to make sacrifices as if they were parents or village patriarchs. In contrast to the images Burgess provides of tame and docile youth parading in perfect formation under the gaze of approving party elders, the students Ivaska describes organized a dramatic procession through the streets of the capitol, demanding a reduction of the recently-imposed terms for National Service. They read Nyerere a petition presenting the confrontation as simply the latest manifestation of a vertical rivalry between the "political elite" and the "educated elite." In doing so they asserted their autonomy and exposed the pretentiousness of nationalist claims on their deference. Theirs was not an unholy renunciation of patriarchy, the students appeared to be saying, it was about the entitlement of students to the same privileges as a cohort of political "nizers" not that many years older than the students.

Although the student demonstrations in Dar es Salaam did not lead to official capitulation, they reveal the fissures between two cohorts, two elites, and two discourses. They suggest continuity between Ganda intellectuals in the 1920s and Tanzanian students in the 1960s who were perhaps equally engaged in a contest over the nature of citizenship. The politics of generation after independence were at the same time inclusive and exclusive: the state recruited, celebrated and foregrounded the vitality of youth on the public stage. And yet the state excluded from its notions of citizenship, images of youth that appeared to conflict with the nationalist imperative of building the nation and its selective invocation of African traditions. Imagining the post-colonial state as a pre-colonial family in which clients affectionately serve their seniors inevitably provoked quarrels. Youth were supposed to serve as the indebted servants of a new order, but stood accused of some of its most flagrant transgressions. Independence from colonial rule did not resolve debates and questions about the status of young people in East Africa as either subjects or citizens. Is citizenship founded upon an ethic of contractual rights, or a sense of obligation, submission and sacrifice? Does citizenship imply a voice in community debates, or participation in the implementation of the decisions of one's seniors? Is authority exercised in reference to meritocratic, democratic or gerontocratic principles? Are

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citizens sovereigns, or instead juniors whose status derives from their familial bond with the supreme elder of the nation? Does the state assume merely a regulatory function, or a parenting role? Is citizenship based upon a neutral, secular and just balancing of competing individual interests, or integration in a national/familial effort toward an objective considered by all to be good?

These were questions asked in East Africa at least through the 1970s.9 By the end of the century some of these debates had receded in correspondence with the contraction of the postcolonial state, and its demonstrated inability to assert itself as a parent or patriarch, particularly in an international environment increasingly hostile to such displays. In the context of the passing of the first generation of nationalist elders-and their connection to state bankruptcy, civil war, or the demise of socialism and statist strategies of economic development-the links between ruling elites and the ancestors have been severed, or at least seriously disturbed. Family metaphors no longer suffice; ruling factions are forced to seek new avenues toward popular legitimacy. This is especially true for postcolonial cities, where a new generation has emerged for whom nationalist claims have little potency, and where young people are especially detached from a nationbuilding ethos that "celebrates the rural as the fundamental expression of the indigenous and the authentic and which despises the city as respon- sible for the loss of both, for detribalization, corruption, and social death" (Holston and Appadurai 1996:189). In East African cities, a social imaginary founded upon the myth of consensus and a collective effort to build the nation has collapsed. Citizenship has taken on new meanings no longer intimately associated with the nation-family, the mandate of the ancestors, or the nationalist narrative in which good citizens mobilize in eternal opposition to internal and foreign exploiters. By the end of the century urban youth were instead, as in West Africa, inventing "the categories of a new sociability," and producing their own "private local memories, selecting from their own past, their own 'founding fathers,' and etching their own signs on the sand and the stele [sic]" (Diouf 1996:236).

This may be seen in Eileen Moyer's essay in this issue that recon- structs the social relationships and discourses of a group of often homeless young men who congregated and conducted business on one street corner in downtown Dar es Salaam between 1999 and 2002. They are not only exemplars of Tanzania's thriving informal economy, they are youth for whom notions of clan, imperial, nationalist or socialist citizenship have little or no resonance. In an era of neo-liberal reforms and the contraction of state powers, they are making claims on urban citizenship through an interrelated struggle to escape police arrest and harassment, to ensure their place of business is a "place of peace," and to simply survive. They are young men who in an earlier era might have been designated as hooligans or loafers and forcibly repatriated to their home villages in order to fulfill colonial or nationalist visions of agrarian productivity. They are also examples of the retreating cultural hegemony of the nation state, and its inability to

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effectively intervene in society's access to both local and transnational cultural forms. Instead of deriving their sense of self-worth through conformity to a nationalist ruling agenda, they look to the lyrics of Bob Marley songs for their survival strategies, social philosophy and sense of aesthetics. They obtain their sense of justice and morality from reggae music, and employ Rastafarian discourse to negotiate local conflicts and to make sense of their difficulties. In terms of their iconography, the father of the nation is notably absent. This particular street corner serves instead as an open-air exhibition for a series of painted images of Bob Marley, a patriarch of truly global scale, whose face embodies a series of spiritual and cultural references utterly autonomous of nationalist memories. Mamadou Diouf may have as easily been speaking of Dar es Salaam as of Dakar when he wrote,

The neighborhood is substituted for the national territory as the canvas for elaborating the symbolic and the imaginary. Discursive and iconographic fables register a local memory that proclaims itself as such against the national memory. ... To the theatricality of power is opposed the theater of the street whose young actors and directors invent scenes and texts by drawing upon a global repertoire. .. . At stake here is a form of citizenship that disavows the biases of tradition and challenges authoritarianism, two outstanding features of the African postcolonial states. Through their cold rejection of the modalities of membership in the nation, the youth are redefining the spaces of legal citizenship and erasing their nationalistic attributes and referents, thereby questioning the state's authority to define citizenship. (Diouf 1996:248-249)

Perhaps the most fundamental argument made by the essays to follow is that both colonial and postcolonial states in the twentieth century sub- sisted on the principle of the nation or territory as a "community of shared purposes" (Holston and Appadurai 1996:192), whether that purpose was framed in the rhetoric of a civilizing mission or a war on poverty, illiteracy and disease. To achieve their ends they at the very least upheld generational discourse that encouraged young people to defer and serve their elders, since the elders were assumed to possess the essential wisdom to discern and define the community's shared purposes. Colonial and postcolonial officials regarded the perceived autonomy, shiftlessness, individuality, and materialism of some young people as a threat to their visions of progress and stability, and therefore preferred to treat these specimens as subjects and not citizens. Yet, a subject could be tamed, disciplined, and taught the virtues of work and the need to contribute, whether through immersion in a colonial school, a Boy Scout or Young Pioneer association, or through two years of National Service. Young people were, after all, the leaders of tomor- row. In order to inculcate such values, nationalists employed colonial-and socialist-techniques of youth mobilization, which ought to be considered

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one of those "bricks" of the "colonial cultural edifice" that nationalists could take apart and re-assemble in order to "shape quite different cultural visions" (Cooper 1994:1527). While the cultural visions may have differed, they shared certain purge categories, and a belief that instruction in the discourse of equal rights, when it conflicted with the reigning family metaphors, ought to be delayed, buried or obstructed.

Colonialism widened tremendously the scale of social, economic and political relations in Africa. In the history of youth in East Africa in the twentieth century, young people seeking inclusion, citizenship and social promotion responded to and asserted new standards of conduct derived from increasingly diverse and disparate origins: Lord Baden Powell, Rasta- farianism, the Russian Revolution, Ujamaa Socialism, the Enlightenment, and the New Testament. In the interplay between precolonial generational discourses and those coming from overseas there was often as much rep- etition as antagonism. In the contemporary landscape youth are gaining more access to and acting upon such global repertoires, and the state can no longer so easily take its legitimacy from the ancestors. And so it may be said that youth at the beginning of a new century occupy a transient position somewhere between subjects and citizens.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank James Brennan, Frederick Cooper and Carol Summers for their careful reading and

constructive comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

NOTES

1. Richard Werbner recommended that scholars not only study ethnic identities, which, he

claimed, represent only "a small fraction" of the many identities mobilized in Africa, but

focus as well on "how, over time, and in a plurality of contested arenas, postcolonial strategies improvise shifting identities." These are expressed "through local languages, through the cultural richness of specific idioms, images, metaphors" (Werbner 1996:1-2).

2. My own work has unfortunately perpetuated such ambiguities; see Burgess 2005. 3. "Age" can be deceiving. Bernardi regards the concept of age in these systems so removed

from associations with actual physiological age, that he prefers the term "structural age," which suggests that an individual's generational status increases over time not so much according to physical age but rather the number of "social activities that are assigned to the individual" (1985:9).

4. Anthropologists have emphasized either the fundamentally distributional or antagonistic nature of these social structures. Simonse and Kurimoto assert they "are as much arenas

for power games as they are a mechanism for dealing with corporate tasks or a ceremonial facade for gerontocratic power.... the oppositional dynamic of age-based power relations is as fundamental as their distributional dimension" (Kurimoto and Simonse 1998:6-7).

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5. The relationship between generation and gender is and will likely continue to be for some

time a promising avenue of research. As Meredith McKittrick has cogently observed, "gen-

eration is always gendered, while gender always has a generational component" (2002:6).

For an insightful study of generation in which female youth are not left out of the story, see

Carton 2000.

6. It is possible to speculate that youth will garner more attention from historians in an era

that has witnessed the recession of classical Marxist verities. In German historical studies,

"historians have begun to concern themselves more intensively with groupings, collectives

and boundaries other than social class.... The result has been a new sense of the degree to which class, as a perceived and felt entity, as a way of defining common interest and

common purpose, shares with other types of social grouping the status of an "imagined

community." (Roseman 1995:4). In their effort to both re-appropriate and transcend the

Marxist intellectual tradition, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue society is not "an

intelligible structure that [can] be intellectually mastered on the basis of certain class posi-

tions and reconstituted, as a rational, transparent order" (Laclau and Mouffe 2001:2). They

assert instead that social labels are "precarious articulations," unbound by any sense of

historical inevitability (2001:68). For an unusually problematic dismissal of the legitimacy

of youth identities in favor of those of social class, see Seekings 1993.

7. In her study of Asante nationalism in the 1950s Jean Allman foregrounds "youngmen" as a

distinct class category, albeit not a "fully-developed" or "fully self-conscious" class (Allman 1993:28-36). See also Allman 1990; Rathbone 1991.

8. Comparisons can be made between Mau Mau and popular insurgency in Southern Rhodesia. Norma Kriger argues oral histories suggest young people collaborated with the guerillas in order primarily to rebel against traditional age-based hierarchical relations (1992:20, 49,

168, 177, 179-86). Peasant grievances "against the African rural elite were stronger motives

to participate in the war than was the state's racial discrimination . .. peasants experienced

resentment against those closest to them rather than the more distant white state" (Kriger

1992:209).

9. For a useful survey of literature on post-colonial youth politics in West Africa from the mid-

1990s, see Cruise O'Brien 1996. Cruise O'Brien suggests the need to distinguish between

different generations of youth-those who matured during the relatively prosperous 1960s

and 1970s-and those who came later who experienced declining access to formal sector employment. O'Brien remarks that youth inability to establish independent households has translated into violence, generational conflict and political unrest. See also Toungara

1995.

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youth and citizenship in east africa || introduction to youth and citizenship in east africa

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