3 This observation, which runs counter to common conceptions, calls for a few explanations, inasmuch as knowledge on this nascent field is not widely shared. 3 Studies on children and childhood in Africa and elsewhere differ on this point (R abain, 1979 L e V in (.)ħ Rather than lament this, it seemed more judicious to turn the lens around and question this heterogeneity (also that of the discipline), something that reveals a field in which young people and youth in Africa remain poorly identified subjects of knowledge.These figures cover a variety of local realities, particularly from the point of view of the demographic transition however, those realities are not yet affecting the general trend.Ĥ For authors who are thinking at the scale of the African continent and endeavouring to place their arguments in certain perspectives-from Joseph-Achille Mbembe’s first book (1985) to Alcinda Honwana’s essay (2012), to Stephen Smith’s recent essay (2018), their publication dates alone illustrating the phenomenon’s timespan-young people and youth in Africa alternately inspire hope or pessimism: sometimes they are the nation’s shining lights thanks to schooling, and offer proof of the continent’s economic emergence, sometimes they are threatening troublemakers and hooligans, and then sometimes they are icons of desperation, such as when we see the figures of street children, or those of child-soldiers, or young migrants at the 18-year borderline, grouped under the banner Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) according to the latest international public policy category (Golaz and Thibon, 2015 Peatrik, 2015 b ). “In 2015, 44% of sub-Saharans (outside of Southern Africa) were under 15 years of age, two thirds were under 25 in Africa as a whole, less than 4% are over 65” (Magrin et al., 2016: 14–15). In the majority of African countries, the median age of the population is around 20 years, and it is as low as 15 in certain countries like Niger and Uganda. Identified in the 1920s with the “detribalised” young person quick to threaten the pre-eminence of elders and disrupt the colonial order (D’Almeida-Topor et al., 1992 Burton and Charton-Bigot, 2010 Ocobock, 2017), African young people and youth blossomed in the postcolonial imagination with the eruption of a wide variety of crises that unsettled the independent states, against a backdrop of population growth with its controversial but obvious effects.ģ Youths primarily constitute a demographic category and are rooted in a statistical reality. “Young people” could thus offer a stimulating means of deepening an anthropology of the ages of life, by examining not the succession of ages, but one particular age from the perspective of a transcultural variation (Peatrik, 2001, 2003 a, 2015 a ).Ģ A little-known fact should be recalled at the outset: “African youth”, a familiar presence in media and the public sphere, has a history dating back to the early 20th century.
Current events also inspired this extension since young people in Senegal, Burkina Faso and other countries seemed to be following in the footsteps of their peers north of the Sahara in mobilising against the powers that be. While completing issue 42 of Ateliers d’anthropologie (Rivoal and Peatrik, 2015)-which explored young people in the southern Mediterranean, based on the category shabâb (which means “young man” in Arabic and covered shared questions and research themes)-the idea arose to comparatively explore the categories “young people” and “youth” in sub-Saharan Africa. 1 Intellectual curiosity that turned into methodological investigation was the point of departure for this issue with deliberately sober titles, presenting a blueprint for an anthropology of youth in Africa.