The Sunday News
Michael Mhlanga
AT the beginning of the 21st century, young Africans find themselves in the middle of newly globalising cultures, as they negotiate shifting forms of identity that traverse the modern and traditional.
They also have to deal with the implications of the increasingly interconnected world of contemporary global capitalism.
These include the way fluctuations in food and other commodity prices can have a drastic impact on their daily lives, as well as the opportunities and social and environmental threats posed by investment by foreign companies in search of natural resources and other development possibilities.
Crucially for my argument here, however, the youth are also increasingly tuned into emerging global discourses about positive futures.
These include human rights and human development discourses as promoted by sovereign states, multilateral institutions and inter-governmental institutions. In this way, young people exist as a kind of meeting point for local and traditional knowledges, and new forms of thinking and doing.
Bringing these different forms of knowledge together presents the best chance of meeting the multiple challenges of poverty.
As well as material assistance, knowledge is central to fighting poverty. To achieve this, we first have to problematise this important continental citizen.
On 24 September 2007, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations said: “The world’s young people are a major human resource for development. Young men and women everywhere are valuable and committed partners in the global efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, including the overarching goal of cutting poverty and hunger in half by 2015.
Young people remain at the forefront of the fight against HIV and Aids. And they bring fresh thinking to longstanding development concerns.” Even today, with the pursuit of what are now Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The crisis of African young citizenry is emblematic of the world’s failure to address the multiple challenges of poverty in Africa.
However, images of young Africans engaged in civil conflict, and as jobless on the streets of slum like cities only tell a small part of the story. In this article, I take the position that African youth present one of the biggest sources of hope and one of the most promising opportunities for addressing the challenge of poverty in Africa.
There is extensive evidence of the way young people’s ingenuity, energy and resilience can be harnessed to generate real and positive change.
No one-size-fits-all approach will work, but the continent is in a unique position to offer powerful ideals, and technical and material assistance that will allow African youth to realise their full potential and generate the kind of locally grounded solutions that should be the basis of any comprehensive challenge to poverty.
A cursory look at the demographics of contemporary Africa reveals the overwhelming size of the youth population as I have always illustrated in what has become a volume of my arguments on youth policy, participation and holistic enterprise. As is the case in many developing countries, where life expectancy is low and birth-rates comparatively high, majority of Africa faces a demographic imbalance that is an important consideration for any strategy aimed at reducing poverty.
It is undoubtable that poverty in most of Africa has hit the youth most. It is important to recognise when addressing issues of youth, that the concept is culturally determined.
Moreover, youth is by no means a homogenous category, and the way that young people experience and cope with poverty is extremely diverse as economies and cultures in Anglo, Luso and Francophone Africa is extremely different.
This makes it all the more important to resist common stereotypes about African youth, particularly young men, as a dangerous source of instability that foretells a chaotic and nasty future for African societies.
This mischaracterisation of the African youth is a product of recent representations of youth that have been dominated by negative images of young “militants” involved in civil conflict, and of threatening young men in overcrowded urban areas.
These perceptions of the threat posed by youth are based on long entrenched misconceptions about Africa from outside the continent. Poignant among them is the colonial representations of parts of Africa as a “Heart of Darkness” that have been carried over into contemporary tropes about African political and societal chaos.
One of the most influential examples of such mischaracterisations is Robert Kaplan’s 1994 and 1997 description of “the coming anarchy”, which has had a notable influence on outside Africa’s foreign policy across the continent. Kaplan’s descriptions are typical of such negative images of Africa, which regularly rely on a perception of African youth in crisis, which is heading toward a darker and more brutal future.
Similarly, the youth bulge theory, holds that impoverished societies with disproportionately large youth populations are more prone to violence.
As with Kaplan’s thesis, however, it relies on some questionable evidence and tends to be coloured by emotionally charged images of angry young men from the global South.
Unfortunately, these images have come to dominate international media coverage.
