Generations past
Subtitle: youth in East African history
By: edited by Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 301
ISBN-13: 9780821419236; 9780821419243; 9780821443439
Subjects: Age groups; Ethnology; Social conditions; Young men; Intergenerational relations; Social change
Description: 'Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under. This situation has attracted growing scholarly attention, resulting in an important and rapidly expanding literature on the position of youth in African societies. While the scholarship examining the contemporary role of youth in African societies is rich and growing, the historical dimension has been largely neglected in the literature thus far. Generations Past seeks to address this gap through a wide-ranging selection of essays that covers an array of youth-related themes in historical perspective. Thirteen chapters explore the historical dimensions of youth in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Ugandan, Tanzanian, and Kenyan societies. Key themes running through the book include the analytical utility of youth as a social category; intergenerational relations and the passage of time; youth as a social and political problem; sex and gender roles among East African youth; and youth as historical agents of change. The strong list of contributors includes prominent scholars of the region, and the collection encompasses a good geographical spread of all three East African countries.'--on cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / G. Thomas Burgess and Andrew Burton; title: Arms and adolescence : male youth, warfare, and statehood in nineteenth-century Eastern Africa / Richard Reid; title: Youth, cattle raiding, and generational conflict along the Kenya-Uganda border / Dave Eaton; title: Setting a moral economy in motion : youth in Tanzania's "age of improvement" / James L. Giblin; title: Colonial youth at the crossroads : fifteen alliance "boys" / Hélène Charton-Bigot; title: Raw youth, school-leavers, and the emergence of structural unemployment in late colonial urban Tanganyika / Andrew Burton; title: Bad boys in the bush? Disciplining Murran in colonial Maasailand / Richard Waller; title: Youth, elders, and metaphors of political change in late colonial Buganda / Carol Summers; title: Youth, the TANU youth league, and managed vigilantism in Dar es Salaam, 1925-73 / James R. Brennan; title: To differentiate rice from grass : youth labor camps in revolutionary Zanzibar / G. Thomas Burgess; title: Premarital sexuality in Great Lakes Africa, 1900-1980 / Shane Doyle; title: "Ruined lives" : an analysis of gender relations, youth sexual behavior, and HIV and AIDs in early twenty-first-century Kenya / Joyce Nyairo and Eunice Kamaara; title: Protecting young people: alcohol, advertising, and youth in Kenya / Justin Willis.