Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (review)

Makers and Breakers fills several important gaps in African postcolonial studies by exposing the plight of the majority and most vulnerable population in Africa: children and youth. The volume does not just endeavor to document their harrowing conditions and experiences. It provides a theoretical framework that enables readers to understand the social processes and economic forces that shape and are being shaped by African youths who find themselves embroiled in Africa's predicament because of their social status, ubiquity, and mobility. However, those of us who remain stubbornly and obsessively positive about the transformative ingenuity of African youth and who believe that African menacing clouds are laced with myriads of silver linings will take issue with the way these youths are portrayed in this volume.

The book is divided into four sections, with John and Jean Comaroff's chapter as the lone essay of the first part, an essay that serves as the theoretical lightning rod for the successive chapters by surveying the many facets of youth which, as a theoretical and disciplinary contraption, "stands for many things at once" and could be tied to the emergence of modernity.

Part 2, "The Pain of Agency, the Agency of Pain," delves into the critical issue of agency, first through two important contributions on child soldiers. Drawing on de Certeau's distinction between tactical agency (i.e., "the power of the weak") and strategic agency, Honwana posits young recruits who fought in civil wars in Angola and Mozambique as interstitial and tactical agents while deconstructing entrenched binary notions of child soldiers as either victims or innocents. Similarly, Mats Utas's essay discusses what could be termed "transient agency" in which young females involved in Liberia's civil war oscillate between the war zone and the civilian community and walk the tightrope between victimhood and agency. On the other hand, Pamela Reynolds's and Brad Weiss's respective essays deal with the cultural production of pain and how young people cope with the feeling of despair and alienation in the African urban crucible.

This discussion about the agentive versatility of youth is picked up in the next part with the two essays by Nicolas Argenti and Deborah Durham on the performative power young people can yield by subverting established notions of power. While Argenti looks at how innovative forms of masquerade in the Cameroonian grassfields provide the youth and women with an alternative discourse that subverts the hegemony of a modernist, national discourse created by the Oku palace, Durham explores choir performances among the Herero youth in Botswana. She argues that although these performances are dismissed by adults as "just playing," they serve as a sounding board that allows the youth to voice dissent and carve out a space within the political arena.

Finally, the last part of the volume looks at the lumpen-youth as agents of social change—dope peddlers in Sierra Leone, witch-children in Congo, and street children in Kinshasa, Dakar, and Addis Ababa. Ibrahim Abdullah's essay is particularly illuminating in that it cogently interrogates the power of subaltern culture as a unifying site of expression that can potentially undermine social barriers and make violence an attractive conduit to political conversation and mobilization. For De Boeck, witchcraft accusations leveled at youth serve a similar purpose and become a crucible of societal change where tradition and modernity clash, where seniority is being reconfigured, and where the forces of globalization have to contend with local strictures. The last essay in this volume focuses on three figures of the marginalized youth: the Shifta (Addis Ababa), the Bul Faal (Dakar), and the Shege (Kinshasa), three locales where Tshikaya Biaya undertook some intensive research before his untimely passing in July 2002, in Dakar. A keen observer of youth culture, Biaya explores not just youth expressive cultures but also the imaginary realm they create through compulsive consumption of narcotic substances and alcohol.

In the afterword...