The Time of Youth: work, social change, and politics in Africa by Alcinda Honwana (review)

Moving away from her earlier studies of young people in war-torn African nations, Honwana focuses on youth from four contrasting countries (Mozambique, South Africa, Senegal and Tunisia) to conceptualize how this social group is an agent for political change. Using the term ‘waithood’ to describe a liminal period experienced by youth anticipating adulthood, Honwana contributes to the emerging literature on youth in waiting. In waithood, youth are not idly awaiting change; they are industrious social actors. But as African youth engage in diverse activities to survive in precarious times, they face many inequalities. Such inequalities, Honwana argues, are far from being geographically defined, and a theme running through the book is the global experience of youth.

The book begins by grounding African youth in the literature on waithood, and by problematizing the understanding of adulthood and full personhood. Introducing the topic with vignettes from recent riots in London and Paris, Honwana includes African youth in the global predicament of young people. The middle chapters are more ethnographic and Africa-focused, covering the aspirations and challenges of African youth as they try to connect to formal economies of education and work. The book then illustrates the daily tactics African youth employ to survive and to realize their dreams, the intimate relationships they develop with each other and other social groups, and finally the relationships they reject with the state as they shun old-fashioned politics. The final chapter returns to broader themes of social change – youth’s engagement with FRELIMO in Mozambique, the 1976 Soweto uprisings, and the more recent Tunisian revolution. Highlighting youth in protest, Honwana closes with a thought-provoking question: ‘Will this waithood generation become the next 1968 generation?’ (p. 169).

The book draws both on Honwana’s extensive past research in Africa and more recent fieldwork – conducting in-depth interviews, facilitating focus groups, just ‘hanging out’ with youth – undertaken in the four countries. As Honwana tells us, ‘Young people were eager to tell their stories’ (p. xi), and she portrays the world of her informants through engaging life stories, weaving different characters through the various themes that constitute this busy tapestry of waiting. From the tactics of taxi drivers in Mozambique, to girls working in call centres in Tunisia and negotiating relationships with sugar daddies in Senegal, Honwana’s examples encapsulate daily realities, inequalities and sentiments of (particularly urban) African youth struggling to make ends meet – experiences understood across the four countries as desenrascar a vida, débrouillage, ‘just getting by’. For instance, Honwana introduces Aicha in Tunisia. At university, Aicha had joined other students to protest against limited future employment opportunities. A year after graduating, we learn that Aicha has yet to find a job and has resigned herself to working in an exploitative call centre, a plight suffered by many over-qualified young Tunisians. Across Africa in Maputo, we are presented with chapa (minibus taxi) drivers working long hours in insecure jobs. Unlike Aicha, these youth are not university graduates – and indeed we might question whether the experiences of youth are really the same across Africa – but Honwana rightly emphasizes youth as a state without choice and of feeling exploited. As such, waithood denotes the ambivalence of modernity: a time for imagining and reaching new opportunities and possibilities, yet also a period of restriction. Beyond looking at young Africans in the global order, Honwana also emphasizes their engagement with it, and their newfound identities, aspirations and frustrations. Unfortunately, while Honwana urges us to recognize the creative means of youth, her analysis is sandwiched between opening and closing vignettes of youth across the globe rioting violently.

Furthermore, while Honwana successfully depicts African youth acting in bustling scenes, just trying to make ends meet, we might question how this social group is actually constituted. Honwana notes that, as some suffer incessant waiting, waithood is blurring the boundaries of youth and adulthood. To what extent are the aspirations, struggles and survival strategies...