Generations Past: youth in East African history ed. by Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot (review)

Current understanding of youth in Africa has been shaped by scholars’ attempts to make sense of what in the mid-1990s was described as the ‘crisis of youth’. In this regard, two main analytical concerns have dominated the debate: the shifting nature of the category of youth and the contrasting and often contradictory way youth affirm their agency, acting as agents both of creative change and of violent disruption.

This collection on youth in East African history represents an interesting contribution to the debate on young people through its attempts to provide a further analytical perspective. The notion of ‘generation’ and the understanding of the continuities that youth practices share with the past constitute the foci of this book.

In their introduction to the volume, Burgess and Burton criticize the fact that youth has become a ‘catchall existential category that encompassed all the subaltern despairs – and desires – of the post-colonial’ (p. 5). Hence, they argue that the notion of ‘generation’, instead, could open up a more historically grounded understanding of youth practices. ‘Generation’, Burgess and Burton point out, does not only correspond with ‘historical cohorts’. It embodies notions of time and history and, more importantly, the different ways the nexus of power and age in pre-, colonial and post-colonial African societies has been shaped by historical processes.

From this perspective, some of the contributions do not necessarily discard the notion of youth, but they reconsider it as consisting of a historically and culturally situated way of defining intergenerational relations. As a result, this history of youth is a cultural history of the category ‘rather than a description of what youth did’ (p. 176), as Summers clearly states in her analysis of how different narrations of youth were used politically in late-colonial Buganda. This approach constitutes both the strength and the weakness of this collection. Voices of young people seldom appear even in the chapters dealing with more recent periods, but, at the same time, the rich historical analysis opens up an understanding of the power dynamics that have framed intergenerational relations.

With this emphasis, Burgess looks into the making of the revolutionary youth through labour camps in Zanzibar. Brennan traces the history of the TANU Youth League from its foundation in the 1950s up to its crisis in the 1970s. Looking at Maasailand, Waller examines how the colonial attempts at reforming or abolishing murranhood constituted the terrain of the confrontations between elders, murrans themselves and colonial administrators. Burton points out that the emergence of youth unemployment in Tanzania was not only an outcome of the concurrence of different social factors, but also a matter for political dialogues between trade unions, nationalists and the colonial (and, later, post-colonial) governments.

A second group of chapters engage more closely with an understanding of the historical continuities that shape youth practices. Reid examines how violence and warfare are embedded historically in the political practices of the region. Looking at modern cattle raids on the Kenya–Uganda border, Eaton argues that these were later manifestations of forms of conflicts that had already existed between elders and youth over marriage and bridewealth. A similar approach is used to describe sexuality, HIV and gender dynamics. Nyairo and Kamaara analyse the persistence of masculine dominance and female subordination as the main reasons for the spreading of HIV in Kenya. Doyle discusses the broader transformation of premarital sex and marriage in late-colonial society and gives insights into the nature of the most recent confrontation between elders and young people over promiscuity and HIV in Great Lakes Africa.

With a similar analytical concern, another group of chapters look at how continuities (and discontinuities) are not only embodied but also negotiated and reproduced. In this regard, these chapters look at different periods of East African history. Focusing on the eve of...