Childhood and Youth in African History

Abstract

Historians of Africa have long been preoccupied with questions of age and generation, but since the 1990s they have become interested in the difficulties of defining who counted as a “child” or a “young person” in African societies. Not only did definitions of childhood and youth shift across the continent, but they also changed over time, and particularly with the imposition of colonial rule when preexisting norms for defining age were overlaid by new conceptualizations brought from Europe. Age served to structure many African societies, with forms of initiation marking moments of transition from one age category to the next. These changes were crucial to the reproduction of those societies, enabling marriage and the creation of new families. These systems were disrupted by colonial conquest, as well as by capitalism and the work of Christian missionaries. In some cases, forms of slavery and pawning, as well as child labor, intensified with the demands of the colonial economy. But at the same time, African children began to attend school, moved to cities, and took up new forms of work. Particularly young men’s difficulties in marrying during the interwar era produced intense generational tension, and a near-collapse of marriage as an institution in some regions. The emergence of gangs and other young men’s associations, some of them associated with anticolonial politics, all spoke to how young African men negotiated the possibilities and limitations of life under colonial rule. For young women—whose sexuality, work, and movement were always more strictly patrolled under patriarchal traditional and colonial systems—the same period allowed many to embrace new forms of “modern” femininity, to attend school, and to work. Children and youth were often the first to adapt to colonial and, later, postcolonial rule, experiencing the complexities of the opening and closure of opportunity under both systems.