Generations Past: Youth in East African History (review)

Musul’manskaia shkola Uroki chistopisaniia [Muslim school. Hand-writing lessons (sic)]. Created between 1865 and 1872. Published in Turkestanskii al’bom, chast’ ėtnograficheskaia, 1871–1872, part 2, vol 1: 67. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division DK854.T87 1872

Generations Past is a collection of twelve essays and an introduction that examines the history of youth and the generational divide in the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. While the contributions are evenly spread across these three countries, they almost exclusively address the twentieth century. The one exception is Richard Reid’s essay on male violence in nineteenth-century Uganda and Tanzania. So for a historically oriented book, this collection does not offer much historical depth. Instead, the essays focus on the colonial and postcolonial periods. But despite the common temporal orientation, the essays do manage to address a wide variety of themes, chief among them labor, education, religion, violence, gender, sexuality, and marriage.

As the authors of the introduction point out, there has been a relative dearth of scholarship on the history of youth and generational relations in Africa, especially given the extraordinarily youthful demographics of most African countries. The median age in East Africa is 17.5, sixty-five percent of the population is under the age of twenty-four, and this demographic pattern, characteristic of much of the twentieth century, is likely to continue well into the twenty-first. Despite these realities, G. Thomas Burgess and Andrew Burton claim that this book is “the first extended collection of essays examining African youth in historical context” (p. 19).

While Generations Past tries to avoid reinforcing the common stereotype of the troubled African youth, the essays generally argue that the colonial period had a dislocating effect on East Africans in general and the youth in particular. Similarly, the colonial legacy continues to affect young Africans into the twenty-first century. The dramatic change of the colonial period may have offered many opportunities that had never existed before, but in general it altered the historic relations between generations in ways that had far-reaching social and political effects.

Although historians of Africa have neglected youth as an analytical category, the opposite has been true of anthropologists, who often focus their analysis of African societies on age-sets or age grades. These social institutions, widespread in East Africa and across the continent more generally, formally divided community members into age-specific groups. For that reason, historians studying Africa are perhaps more disposed to accept the notion of “youth” as a discrete social category worthy of investigation than historians studying other continents. Yet the main problem in studying the history of youth in Africa is the paucity of sources, and this issue is not addressed in this collection of essays. Ironically, many of our best sources for the history of youth in East Africa are early examples of colonial ethnographies, in addition to the writings of precolonial European “explorers” and missionaries. These types of sources pose obvious problems for historians. But there are relatively few precolonial sources for East African history that are not mediated through Europeans. One exception to this rule is found in the Islamic societies of the Swahili coast, but Generations Past does not include a single essay based on Islamic sources. Yet even old Islamic societies in Africa produced relatively few texts with detailed information about the youth experience, and even fewer still provide glimpses of society as seen from a youthful perspective.

The collection’s focus on relatively recent history is accentuated by three essays written by Dave Eaton, by Joyce Nyairo and Eunice Kamaara, and by Justin Willis, which address the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays examine the issues of cattle raiding, sexuality and HIV, and alcohol consumption, respectively. Three other essays, written by Andrew Burton, Carol Summers, and G. Thomas Burgess, treat the late colonial period and...