Generations Past: Youth in East African History

Introduction

 Introduction g. thomas burgess and andrew burton Generation has long formed a key theme of Africanist scholarship. For much of the twentieth century anthropologists produced classic monographs on age-grades and age-sets in rural societies, frequently observing how formal rituals such as initiation and marriage mark the passages of the life cycle and endow Africans with status, control over resources, wisdom, and civic virtue.They characterized gerontocracy and patriarchy as systems of order and/or dynamic tension, and correctly observed that, at least in male society, no concept or social category surpassed generation both in terms of its importance in governing relations and as a source of values and sensibilities. In no way fixed or immune to internal or external pressures, patriarchal discourse and ritual served as references and anchoring principles that were inherited, contested, and reinvented over time. Although anthropologists developed a series of well-rehearsed understandings and explanatory terms such as age grades and age sets, their ethnographies did not always examine how, particularly in the colonial era, the common understandings and institutions that had long governed relations between generations—and which constituted a key means by which Africans maintained social order—were experiencing profound and often irreversible change. The major exceptions were studies animated by colonial worries over the perceived decline of “tribal” discipline . What is perhaps more obvious now is that, as young people in Africa migrated in greater numbers to towns and cities, their immersion in a new world of urban tastes, sounds, and stimuli, and new encounters with diverse peoples and conditions led to relative anonymity and often a process of personal reinvention and the embrace of new identities. Generation lost its fixed currency and was often reduced to the status of a secondary or tertiary category—and for most scholars a conceptual afterthought. And as the village and clan in Africa lost integrity— at least in the eyes of many observers—as reportedly timeless and self-enclosed entities, so also in Africanist literature did the concept of youth lose its once seemingly immutable aspect. While some anthropologists and others sought to understand and chart the endurance or demise of gerontocratic values and control over the young, most scholars by the 1970s chose, if anything, to simply note the  g . t h o m a s b u r g e s s a n d a n d r e w b u r t o n youthfulness of their actors, to recognize youth as a transitional category, while paying little attention to the label as a discrete social—or analytical—group.1 Most anthropologists no longer considered generation fashionable or compelling and turned toward the study of other categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity. Historians were particularly uninterested in generation as a conceptual tool. Of late, however, this has begun to change. After absorbing some of the recent advances made in African studies, scholars now find themselves better placed to reexamine categories such as generation that once had, and continue to have, descriptive power. And as historians begin to assume the same confidence regarding the examination of postcolonial Africa as they have long possessed in their analyses of colonialism, they will likely find the endurance of generation as an ordering principle and means by which Africans explain the world as a promising field of research. In the first decade of the twentieth century scholars have, fortunately, revisited youth, and a number of major, interdisciplinary conferences have taken place with generation as the organizing theme. An important literature on the subject is emerging.2 As an academic topic, it appears that youth has—so to speak—come of age. This is equally true of East Africa as of other parts of the continent.3 Some publications chart the emergence of a “youth bulge” in African populations .4 However, youthful predominance has in fact been characteristic of African societies for at least half a century now. Taking mainland Tanzania as an example of continent-wide trends, the first reliable national census in 1948 discovered 45 percent of the population was under sixteen and almost 90 percent under forty-five. In the 1957 census the percentages of those under sixteen and forty-five were broadly similar. Breaking the age groups down further one discovers a full 70 percent of the population was 29 or under. Children remained the dominant group; those from birth to age fourteen constituted 42 percent of the overall population. By contrast, that section of the population which might be...