Precarity, Fixers, and New Imaginative Subjectivities of Youth in Urban Cameroon

The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190930028.013.38 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Divine Fuh

Keyword(s):

Urban Youth ◽

Young Men ◽

Alternative Possibilities ◽

African Cities ◽

Youth Agency

This essay explores how it may be possible to dismantle and recreate frameworks for understanding youth agency and precarity in African cities. These are places where youth are regularly portrayed as toxic. The essay reflects and builds on an emerging body of literature that approaches youth as civic agents actively involved in reimagining and recreating alternative possibilities for themselves and their communities. Addressing these works, the notion of fixers is used to unpack the ways in which young men exhibit care and solidarity in urban Cameroon. Through productive masculinities, urban youth develop new modes of agency that allow them to become entrepreneurs of hope, despite the permanent difficulties of finding a place in a society that apparently does not have one for them.

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Fluid Multilingual Practices among Youth in Cameroon and Mozambique

The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190930028.013.30 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Torun Reite ◽

Francis Badiang Oloko ◽

Manuel Armando Guissemo

Keyword(s):

Knowledge Production ◽

Urban Youth ◽

Social Space ◽

Empirical Studies ◽

Theoretical Discussion ◽

The South ◽

African Cities ◽

Social Lives ◽

The Social

Inspired by recent epistemological and ontological debates aimed at unsettling and reshaping conceptions of language, this essay discusses how mainstream sociolinguistics offers notions meaningful for studying contexts of the South. Based on empirical studies of youth in two African cities, Yaoundé in Cameroon and Maputo in Mozambique, the essay engages with “fluid modernity” and “enregisterment” to unravel the role that fluid multilingual practices play in the social lives of urban youth. The empirically grounded theoretical discussion shows how recent epistemologies and ontologies offer inroads to more pluriversal knowledge production. The essay foregrounds: i) the role of language in the sociopolitical battles of control over resources, and ii) speakers’ reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of register formations of fluid multilingual practices. Moreover, it shows how bundles of localized meanings construct belongings and counterhegemonic discourses, as well as demonstrating speakers’ differential valuations and perceptions of boundaries and transgressions across social space.

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‘We are taught to act’: hustling on the move in Kampala and Nairobi

Africa ◽

10.1017/s0001972020000868 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 91 (1) ◽

pp. 95-112

Author(s):

William Monteith ◽

George Mirembe

Keyword(s):

East Africa ◽

Film Industry ◽

Language Skills ◽

Young Men ◽

Economic Opportunities ◽

African Cities ◽

Individual Survival ◽

Urban Contexts

AbstractThis article explores the question of what happens when highly socialized and contingent forms of provisioning go wrong, and young men are forced to start again in unfamiliar urban contexts. The decline of George Mirembe's moneylending business in Kampala pre-empted his departure from the country and his arrival in Nairobi in search of new socio-economic opportunities. Lacking the documents and language skills necessary to enter formal sectors of the economy, George claimed asylum as a sexual refugee while working as a smuggler and a voice actor in the shadow film industry. His activities illustrate the advantages and limitations of the hustle as a framework for understanding the activities of transnational ‘others’ in African cities. I argue that translational practices of acting and storytelling have become a generalized tactic of survival among migrants in urban East Africa. Such practices are illustrative of a form of ‘uprooted hustle’ – or hustling on the move – that is oriented towards individual survival and exit rather than place-based transformation.

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‘We are passing our leisure time’: moving on from education in eastern Uganda

Africa ◽

10.1017/s0001972019001104 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 90 (2) ◽

pp. 252-272 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ben Jones

Keyword(s):

Urban Youth ◽

Leisure Time ◽

Young Men ◽

Large Degree ◽

Rural Setting ◽

Younger Men ◽

A Site ◽

The Relationship ◽

English Premier League ◽

Eastern Uganda

AbstractIn the trading centre of Atine Atirir in eastern Uganda, young men gather to play ludo. They are educated but most do not have salaried employment. Many farm and do some form of casual labour. They talk about the importance of leisure and ‘leisure time’ and discuss the prospects of Arsenal in the English Premier League. In this article I explore the relationship between education, farming and ‘leisure time’ and look at the ways in which young men in particular make sense of lives that involve both schooling and farming. A number of scholars have focused on the tensions and frustrations of educated – typically urban – youth in Africa and elsewhere. They observe a growing distance between older and younger people, and the ways young men define their situation as one of boredom, dissatisfaction and waiting. By contrast, I show the ways in which the ludo board helped younger men in a poorer, rural setting elide an interest in an ‘educated style’ with rural forms of work – farming, petty trading and casual employment – and how the space around the game was mostly a site of play and relaxation, a place for passing, rather than killing, time. There was also a large degree of sympathy between the generations.

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Straining: Young Men Working through Waithood in Freetown, Sierra Leone

Africa Spectrum ◽

10.1177/000203971505000302 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 50 (3) ◽

pp. 29-48 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Brandon Finn ◽

Sophie Oldfield

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Sierra Leone ◽

Young Men ◽

Policy Debate ◽

African Cities ◽

Working Through ◽

Youth Bulge ◽

The City ◽

Informal Trading

Young men in precarious situations of persistent un(der)employment in post-civil war Freetown, Sierra Leone are depicted in popular and policy debate as “stuck” economically or “dangerous” and prone to violence. In the present paper, by contrast, we draw on young men's explanations of their work and livelihood struggles as “straining.” We explore the logic of straining, its innovations and demands, and its geography across the city, especially where acts of straining interface with the prohibition and criminalisation of informal trading. We argue that straining innovates and endures because of (not despite) young men's marginalisation and limited autonomy and power. In this context, young men build forms of provisional agency and enact dynamic forms of waithood, in their strategies to earn a living to try to support their families and to negotiate a transition from youth to manhood. Drawing on this research, we argue for a more complex understanding of young men at work in Freetown, in particular, and of the “youth bulge,” in general, in African cities.

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The Invisible Niche of AUYL

10.1093/oso/9780190657543.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Philip W. Rudd

Keyword(s):

Urban Youth ◽

Social World ◽

Traditional Values ◽

African Cities ◽

Colonial Empire ◽

African Youth ◽

Colonial Order ◽

Youth Language ◽

Modern Identity ◽

The Invisible

In African cities, postcolonial ambiguity and contradiction bombard speakers, who hybridize traditional values with new urban identities and successfully bridge the old to the new with African Urban Youth Language (AUYL), a term inclusive of argot, slang, and register usage. Sheng, the AUYL from Nairobi, Kenya, exemplifies the metaphorical reversal of the old colonial order, symbolizing an invisible niche binding speakers neither to the traditional ethnic role nor to the old colonial empire and providing a sense of cosmopolitanism. African youth construct this new and modern identity, but the elites, seeing only fragmented nonstandard usage, treat the AUYL as illegitimate in order to render it nonexistent. This sociocultural chapter explores grammatical tendencies and lexical manipulations to disclose how AUYL is a “stylistic practice” (Eckert 2008) or bricolage (Hebdige 1979) that empowers speakers to construct a more complex, and meaningful, postcolonial social world.

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