Rebellious youth in colonial Africa

Journal of African History

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 77-92

  Waller, Richard ^a  

^a BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Colonial; Gender; General conflict; Masculinity; Youth

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; GENDER; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; SOCIAL CONFLICT; YOUNG POPULATION;

AFRICA;

EID: 33748477663     PISSN: 00218537     EISSN: 14695138     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853705001672     Document Type: Article

References (148)

1. P. Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest (Oxford, 1996)
2. J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979), 62-3.
3. J. Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge, 2005), 305
4. T. Spear, Mountain Farmers (Oxford, 1997), 71
5. J. Lonsdale, 'Authority, gender and violence', in E. Atieno Odhiambo and J. Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford, 2003), 46-75.
6. Quoted in J. Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993), 44.
7. L. Lindsay and S. Miescher (eds.), Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Portsmouth NH, 2003), esp. chs. by Miescher and Lindsay;
8. C. Summers, Colonial Lessons (Portsmouth NH, 2002), ch. 6
9. T. Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? (London, 1995)
10. E. Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives (Portsmouth NH, 1992), ch. 5
11. S. Morrow, '"No girl leaves the school unmarried": Mabel Shaw and the education of girls at Mbereshi, Northern Rhodesia, 1915-1940', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 19 (1986), 601-35
12. G. Mianda, 'Colonialism, education and gender relations in the Belgian Congo: The évolué case', in J. Allman, S. Geiger and N. Musisi (eds.), Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, 2002), 144-63.
13. Quoted in B. Carton, Blood from Your Children (Charlottesville, 2000), 35.
14. P. Lovejoy and J. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery (Cambridge, 1993).
15. For a recent discussion of the debate over 'tradition', see T. Spear, 'Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa', Journal of African History, 4 (2003), 3-27.
16. See e.g. A. Burton, 'Urchins, loafers and the cult of the cowboy: urbanization and delinquency in Dar-es-Salaam, 1919-1961', Journal of African History, 42 (2001), 199-216.
17. 'Mine marriages' appeared to reproduce an 'anti-family' of men, though miners, in fact, used them to reinforce more conventional notions of gendered authority at home. See P. Harries, Work, Culture and Identity (Portsmouth NH, 1994), 200-8.
18. The structure of early prostitution in Nairobi perhaps offers a female example of 'alternative families', in the work of L. White, The Comforts of Home (Chicago, 1990), 62-5, 120-3.
19. Similar solidarities may have been concealed within the juvenile street gangs and prostitution networks that alarmed urban authorities in Nigeria. See L. Fourchard, 'Lagos and the invention of juvenile delinquency in Nigeria, 1920-1960', this vol.
20. Quoted in C. Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935-1976 (Portsmouth NH, 2000), 22.
21. See C. Summers, '"Subterranean evil" and "tumultuous riot": authority and alienation at King's College, Budo, Uganda, 1942', this vol.
22. J. Lonsdale, 'Listen while I read: The orality of Christian literacy in the young Kenyatta's making of the Kikuyu', in L. de la Gorgendiere (ed.), Ethnicity in Africa: Roots, Meanings and Implications (Edinburgh, 1996), 17-53
23. G. Kershaw, Mau Mau From Below (Oxford, 1997), ch. 7.
24. E. Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change (Portsmouth NH, 1996), ch. 7. Akyeampong is referring to the post-Independence period, but drunkenness had been common before.
25. Iliffe, Honour, 301-5
26. C. Campbell, 'Learning to kill? Masculinity, the family and violence in Natal', Journal of Southern African Studies, 18 (1992), 614-28
27. Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi, 61-71.
28. See e.g. J. Seekings, Heroes or Villains? (Braamfontein, 1993),
29. and T. Lodge and W. Nasson, All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s (London, 1992).
30. Summers, Colonial Lessons;
31. J. Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle (Pietermaritzburg, 1999)
32. D. Peterson, Creative Writing (Portsmouth NH, 2004), esp. ch. 6. Concerns over (professional) status also led African teachers, at least tacitly, to side with their pupils.
33. L. Thomas, Politics of the Womb (Berkeley, 2003), 3-17
34. J. Allman, 'Rounding up spinsters: Gender chaos and unmarried women in colonial Asante', in D. Hodgson and S. McCurdy (eds.), 'Wicked' Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth NH, 2001), 130-48.
35. T. Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1950 (Oxford, 2005), 20-7, 144-5.
36. Thomas, Politics of the Womb, ch. 3
37. J. Davison, Voices from Mutira (Boulder, 1989), 201.
38. For a similar reaction, see T. Ranger, 'Missionary adaptations of African religious institutions: The Masasi case', in T. Ranger and I. Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion (Berkeley, 1972), 237. Ranger notes that although the adaptation of male initiation was relatively successful that of female initiation was not, 247.
39. R. Waller, 'Disciplining youth in colonial Maasailand', paper presented at the ASA Conference, Boston, 2003.
40. For nyau in Malawi and asafo in Ghana as examples, see I. Linden, 'The resistance of the Nyau societies to the Roman Catholic missions in colonial Malawi', in Ranger and Kimambo (eds.), Historical Study, 261-7
41. D. Fortescue, 'The Accra crowd, the Asafo and the opposition to the Municipal Corporations Ordinance', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 24 (1990), 348-75.
42. See e.g. E. Eldredge, A South African Kingdom (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 13
43. Carton, Blood from Your Children, 30-1, 86-7
44. L. Lindsay, 'Money, marriage and masculinity on the colonial Nigerian railway', in Lindsay and Miescher (eds.), Men and Masculinities, 140-1.
45. Harries, Work, Culture and Identity, 201-2
46. C. van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, 11 (Harlow, 1982), 17-19
47. B. Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng (Portsmouth NH, 1991), ch. 2
48. H. Bradford, A Taste of Freedom (New Haven, 1987), 38-9
49. A. Clayton and D. Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya, 1895-1963 (London, 1974), 191-2
50. T. Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London, 1987), 81-2. Van Onselen implies that children may have been less sexually threatening to white householders, as well as cheaper, than adults.
51. E.g. Kanogo, African Womanhood;
52. J. Allman and V. Tashjian, I Will Not Eat Stone (Portsmouth NH, 2000), chs. 4-5
53. D. Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power (Oxford, 1993)
54. T. Barnes, 'We Women Worked So Hard' (Portsmouth NH, 1999), ch. 4
55. J. Parpart, '"Wicked women" and "respectable ladies": Reconfiguring gender on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1936-1964', in Hodgson and McCurdy,' Wicked' Women, 274-92. None of these studies present women as passive victims, however.
56. T. Parsons, Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens OH, 2004), 22. Parsons's account indicates that youth group activity was aimed at boys not girls.
57. In 1947, for example, schoolgirls at Dadaya Mission in Zimbabwe staged a boycott for which the ringleaders were flogged, but, as Barnes fears, this may simply become another 'eclipsed footnote' to a male narrative. She speculates that assertions of masculinity may have obscured women's actions. See Barnes, 'We Women Worked So Hard', 108, 135.
58. Fourchard, 'Invention of juvenile delinquency'. In 1946, street hawking was proscribed for girls under 16.
59. See e.g. C. Glaser, 'Managing the sexuality of urban youth: Johannesburg, 1920s-1960s', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38 (2005), 301-27
60. S. Klausen, Race, Maternity and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910-1939 (New York, 2005)
61. D. Gaitskell, '"Wailing for purity": Prayer unions, African mothers and adolescent daughters, 1912-1940', in S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London, 1982), 338-57.
62. The idea of 'manliness' promoted by youth movements did, however, include sexual abstinence as well as respect. See Parsons, Boy Scout Movement, 17-21, 60-1.
63. S. Marks, 'Patriotism, patriarchy and purity: Natal and the politics of Zulu ethnic consciousness', in L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, 1989), 225-30
64. Allman, 'Rounding up spinsters'.
65. Young women themselves, however, did not necessarily see their lives in town as disordered; nor were all of them disreputable - White, Comforts of Home;
66. B. Frederiksen, 'African women and their colonisation of Nairobi', Azania, 36-7 (2001-2), 223-34.
67. E. Akyeampong, '"Wo pe tam, won pe ba" ("You like cloth but you don't want children"): Urbanization, individualism and gender relations in colonial Ghana c1900-1939', in D. Anderson and R. Rathbone (eds.), Africa's Urban Past (Oxford, 2000), 222-34
68. G. Kynoch, '"A man among men": Gender, identity and power in South Africa's Marashea gangs', Gender and History, 13 (2001), 249-72.
69. Similar attitudes are revealed in popular fiction: Examples in S. Newell (ed.), African Popular Fiction (London, 2002).
70. For background, see J. Lewis, Empire State-Building (Oxford, 2000). Lewis notes the connection between the discovery of urban poverty in Africa and its re-discovery in the metropole during the Second World War on pp.68-79.
71. For a recent review of the literature on demarcating urban space, see A. Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar-es-Salaam (Oxford, 2005).
72. Repatriation orders were instituted during the war, though mechanisms for removing 'undesirables' were already in place under existing ordinances. As elsewhere, they were draconian but ineffective in reducing the numbers - see Burton (ed.), African Underclass, ch. 12,
73. and S. Heap, '"Jaguda Boys": Pickpocketing in Ibadan, 1930-1960', Urban History, 24 (1997), 336-9.
74. South African pass laws had similar aims, but probably increased rather than decreased the scale of the problem by making it impossible for those without papers to get legal employment. See Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi, 38-41, 101.
75. Nigeria was unusual in its continuing concentration on urban social welfare; other colonies shifted their attention to rural community development. See J. Iliffe, The African Poor (Cambridge, 1987), 187, 200-6.
76. The same might be said of historians. Existing colonial urban studies outside South Africa tell us little about youth crime (as opposed to the criminalization of youth activities). However, the study of court, police and prison records has perhaps now reached the point where young criminals can be looked for and studied apart from 'criminal youth'.
77. There were about thirty juvenile convictions a year in Nigerian courts in the late 1920s: In the mid-1940s the figure was 845. By late 1949, Ibadan courts were dealing with twenty cases a day according to Heap, '"Jaguda Boys"', 341.
78. The elision, perhaps best captured by the American term 'correction', appears in the earliest colonial reformatories in South Africa and Senegal, both of which arose from a need to control those set adrift by conquest or emancipation. See L. Chisholm, 'The pedagogy of Porter: The origins of the reformatory in the Cape Colony, 1882-1910', Journal of African History, 27 (1986), 481-95
79. I. Thioub, 'Juvenile marginality and incarceration during the colonial period', in F. Bernault (ed.), A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth NH, 2003), 79-95.
80. K. Thompson, Moral Panics (London, 1998)
81. D Anderson, 'Depression, dust bowl, demography and drought: The colonial state and soil conservation in East Africa in the 1930s', African Affairs, 83 (1984), 321-43. Both erosion and delinquency, as newly discovered 'problems', shared a certain blindness to the past, created climates of anxious inquiry and moral questioning, fostered a determination to intervene through legislation and were part of an attempt by the Colonial Office to manage its territories in a more scientific and centralized manner.
82. Iliffe, African Poor, esp. chs. 10-11. I am indebted to John Lonsdale for ideas about the moral dimension of poverty.
83. F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge, 1996), esp. Part III.
84. From the rich literature, not necessarily focused on the young, see especially: P. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge, 1995)
85. articles in E. Akyeampong and C. Ambler (eds.), 'Leisure in African society', Special Issue, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35 (2002)
86. M. Moorman, 'Dueling bands and good girls: Gender, music and nation in Luanda's musseques, 1961-1974', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 37 (2004), 255-88
87. L. Fair, Pastimes and Politics (Athens OH, 2001)
88. J. Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens OH, 2002)
89. Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change.
90. The 'fantasy space' opened up by colonial cinema and the cultural space of ' otherwise' were important arenas for self-fashioning - see e.g. C. Ambler, 'Popular films and colonial audiences: The movies in Northern Rhodesia', American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 81-105
91. idem, 'Mass media and leisure in Africa', in Akyeampong and Ambler (eds.), 'Leisure in African society', 125-9
92. Moorman, 'Dueling bands', 262-3.
93. For a modern example of the appropriation of film narratives and types by dissident youth, see Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest, 107-11.
94. C. Kadalie, My Life and the ICU (London, 1970), chs. 1-2.
95. E.g. E. Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London, 1959).
96. See also S. Miescher, 'The life histories of Boakye Yiadom', in L. White, S. Miescher and D. Cohen (eds.), African Words, African Voices (Bloomington, 2001), 162-93.
97. Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng,
98. and S. Geiger, TANU Women (Portsmouth NH, 1997), provide models for interactive biography.
99. Multigenerational biographies may be especially useful - e.g. R. Werbner, Tears of the Dead (Edinburgh, 1991).
100. Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change, 120-4.
101. Also see comments on defending the right to recreation in Akyeampong and Ambler (eds.), 'Leisure in African society', 9.
102. J. Allman, 'The youngmen and the porcupine: Class, nationalism and Asante's struggle for self-determination, 1954-1957', Journal of African History, 31 (1990), 263-79
103. Geiger, TANU Women;
104. Seekings, Heroes or Villains? 63.
105. Summers, 'Authority and alienation'.
106. Seekings, Heroes or Villains, ch. 3. Unfortunately, there are relatively few similar anatomies of the youthful 'crowd' elsewhere.
107. See F. Cooper, 'Conflict and connection: Rethinking colonial African history', Ame0rican Historical Review, 99 (1994), 1516-45.
108. For one example, see N. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 5.
109. J. Lonsdale, 'The moral economy of Mau Mau', in J. Lonsdale and B. Berman, Unhappy Valley (London, 1992), ch. 12.
110. Keeping pace with the radical demands of youth worried the ANC leadership and may also have been a problem elsewhere - Lodge and Nasson, Black Politics in South Africa, 188.
111. E.g. T. Burgess, 'Cinema, bell bottoms and miniskirts: Struggles over youth and citizenship in revolutionary Zanzibar', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35 (2002), 287-313
112. Burton, African Underclass, conclusion;
113. Fourchard, 'Invention of juvenile delinquency'. Vigilantism may be one expression, youth wingers as social disciplinarians another.
114. Martin, Leisure and Society, ch. 4
115. Fair, Pastimes and Politics, ch. 5.
116. T. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa (London, 1975). Retired migrants sponsored dance teams in the lakeshore villages of Northern Malawi.
117. Moorman, 'Dueling bands', 275
118. Fair, Pastimes and Politics, ch. 4.
119. Both authors note connections between football and music - Moorman, 'Dueling bands', 274
120. Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 262-3.
121. J. Willis, Potent Brews (Oxford, 2002), chs. 6-7
122. Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change, 53-8.
123. M. Channock, Law, Custom and Social Order (Cambridge, 1985), 125-36.
124. R. Waller, ' Waving or drowning? Age organisation in the long term', paper presented to the conference on Precolonial African History in a Postcolonial Age, Madison, 2005
125. S. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth NH, 1996), ch. 3
126. Iliffe, Honour, 301.
127. Waller, 'Waving or drowning'.
128. See also J. Lonsdale, 'Contests of time: Kikuyu historiography, old and new', in A. Harneit-Sievers (ed.), A Place in the World (Leiden, 2002), 202-54.
129. Hodgson and McCurdy, arguing for a 'chronology of uncontrollability', note that varieties of 'wickedness' are historically specific -Hodgson and McCurdy, 'Wicked' Women, 10-14.
130. In Kenya, the dichotomy took on a distinctly 'anti-urban' bias that survived and became part of the self-image of delinquency, as suggested by the dystopic view of town in the picaresque novels of Meja Mwangi and Mwangi Ruheni. See also J. Lonsdale, 'Town life in colonial Kenya', Azania, 36-7 (2001-2), 207-22.
131. Waller, 'Disciplining youth';
132. M. J. Hay, 'Changes in clothing and struggles over identity in colonial Western Kenya', in J. Allman (ed.), Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington, 2004), 75-7.
133. But see P. Spencer, The Samburu (London, 1965), ch. 5,
134. and Waller, 'Disciplining youth'.
135. For an example that links migrant and rural experiences, see W. Beinart, 'The origins of the Indlavini', African Studies, 50 (1991), 103-28.
136. My thanks to Tim Parsons for reminding me of this.
137. The forcible re-export of problem youth thus seemed an obvious solution to urban authorities, both colonial and post-colonial.
138. Carton, Blood from Your Children, 134-7
139. P. Bonner, 'Desirable or undesirable Basotho women? Liquor, prostitution and the migration of Basotho women to the Rand, 1920-1945', in C. Walke0r (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town, 1990), 221-50
140. White, Comforts of Home, 110-19.
141. Van Onselen, Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 11, 193-4. Rurally oriented amalaita gangs were not displaced by urban tsotsis until the 1930s.
142. F. Cooper, Africa since 1940 (Cambridge, 2002), 34-5.
143. This point is best pursued within the periodization of urban culture generally - see Lonsdale, 'Town life', 220-2.
144. J. Hyslop, 'White working class women and the invention of apartheid: "purified" Afrikaner nationalist agitation for legislation against "mixed" marriages', Journal of African History, 36 (1995), 57-81
145. K. Mooney, 'Ducktails, flick-knives and pugnacity: Subcultural and hegemonic masculinities in South Africa, 1948-1960', Journal of Southern African Studies, 24 (1998), 753-74.
146. Seekings, Heroes or Villains? xii;
147. L. Chisholm, 'Gender and deviance in South African industrial schools and reformatories for girls, 1911-1934', in Walker (ed.), Women and Gender, 306.
148. The topic has received little attention, but see D. Kennedy, Islands of White (Durham, 1987).