Abstract
Since Alcinda Honwana´s popularization of ‘waithood’ in 2013, the concept has become omnipresent in studies on youth on the African continent. It has been used to analyse the social immobilities young people are confronted with in times of an accelerating neo-liberalisation of economies and restrictive patriarchal authority. More than ten years later, we think it is time to critically reflect on the concept and its use by asking whether the term has helped to grasp youths’ lifeworlds across urban and rural locations, gender, class, race and religion. Acknowledging that African youth remain widely marginalized and face social barriers of limited resources to complete (formal) educational pathways and to enter formal labour markets, we want to elaborate on how youth in diverse settings formulate, negotiate and enact strategies and practices to build their futures. Hereby, and following Guyer (2007) and Stasik et al. (2020), we find it helpful to distinguish between different futures, for which we suggest a differentiation between near, middle and distant futures. Hereby, we are specifically interested in how youth navigate aspirations, closures as well as possible opportunities in relation to these specific temporalities of futures. We are further interested in how far ‘waithood’ is useful beyond its dominant focus on young urban men and helps to understand the hustles and projects of so far widely neglected actors such as rural youth and young women. Finally, we welcome long-term perspectives on youths’ immobilities and whether and how they are eventually turned into social mobilities such as social adulthood.
Presentations
Issa Tamou
BIGSAS University of Bayreuth (Germany)
African Youth in the Futures Making: An Analysis from the Perspective of Rural Realities in Northern Benin
African youth is constantly characterised as a waiting generation. Taken in its urban environment, many researchers have looked at it with the concept of waithood, and thematized multiple challenges to ensure the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Although this transition is marked by long periods of waiting, it does not leave indifferent these young people who are struggling to fulfil their aspirations and secure their future. Just like urban youth, rural youth aspire to a better future. An imagined future that requires constant and non-linear actions. To this end, it’s clear that these young people don’t wait. They are engaged in a multitude of activities, so they are always hustling to achieve their goals. Using ethnographic fieldwork based on interviews and observation of the day-to-day practices of young people in rural areas, this study analyses waithood through the prism of rural reality in northern Benin. It explores the strategies deployed by young people in constructing their futures (near, medium and distant). It also shows how these strategies enable young people to negotiate their passage to social maturity.
Keywords: Youth, future, waithood, rural, northern Benin
Christian Ungruhe
University of Bayreuth (Germany)
What comes after ‘waithood‘? (Out-of-)youth trajectories and temporalities among rural-urban migrants in Ghana
Over the past decade, Alcinda Honwana’s popularisation of ‘waithood’ has shaped the discourse on youth in Africa to a large extent. Shifting away from studies that had emerged around the turn of century and that emphasised young people’s agencies, possibilities and creativities in more or less challenging social, political and economic environments, the dominant trope since is characterised by youth’s powerlessness, bleak presents and uncertain futures. Following ‘waithood’, studies have foregrounded young people’s enduring social stasis in various settings and with reference to blocked pathways to social adulthood, inadequate educational and job opportunities, political oppression, economic decline and armed conflict.
Certainly, those forms of hardship exist and shall not be underestimated. However, I would argue, such observations follow a narrow perspective that emphasise practices and experiences of the ‘here and now’ and hereby tend to neglect youths’ relations and negotiations over time (and space) that may qualify once-observed expressions of ‘waithood’. A perspective that takes into account youths’ simultaneous and dynamic embeddedness in various social settings, e.g. among peers and the family, across relevant localities as well as in the present and with regard to their future lives will move away from ‘spotlight ethnography’ and qualify waithood’s one-dimensional conceptual approach.
Based on longitudinal and translocal research in northern and southern Ghana with various groups of young rural-urban migrants, I will depict how young people’s struggle to overcome social stasis unfolds, is negotiated and possibly reproduced across space, between and within generations and over young people’s life courses within and out of youth.
Jesper Bjarnesen
The Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala (Sweden)
A family affair? Young people’s future-making through phatic kinship in West Africa
When generations of labour migrants create and uphold transnational connections, it is often understood to be a family affair. Pioneers send for their children, or pave the way for parents, siblings and more distant relatives, and transnational spaces are maintained through the similar aspirations and trajectories of new generations of migrants. What is less understood is how flexible notions of kinship may be in these contexts. On the basis of a long-standing ethnographic involvement with transnational mobilities between Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, this paper reflects on the ways in which idioms of kinship serve as a central currency for young people in facilitating labour migration and other moves in this region. The analysis emphasises historical continuities in labour mobility between the two countries, vested in local ideals of hospitality and solidarity in Côte d’Ivoire, as well as the ruptures in these social contracts through the past two decades of political and armed conflict.
The analysis thereby offers a re-positioning of the scholarship on African youth and waithood with a point of departure in the concept of social becoming and a gendered reading of African masculinities. While the notion of waithood, I argue, was an important trope in highlighting experiences of stuckedness and failed aspirations, its proliferation has sometimes clouded our understanding of youth temporalities by taking rhetorical statements about ideal of utopian futures at face value. Anchoring our analysis of future-making in the everyday practices of creating and maintaining social ties through phatic labour (cf. Elyachar 2010), I suggest, offers a more practice-oriented understanding of the myriad ways in which young people invest in social connectedness as a stepping stone towards both immediate and distant futures.
Henrietta M. Nyamnjoh
University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Waithood in Motion: Imagined futures, (im)mobilities and waiting among Cameroonian and Ethiopian migrants
This paper examines the concept of “waithood” – the prolonged period of waiting and uncertainty experienced by young people – among Cameroonian and Ethiopian migrants in Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on research with youth in both home and host countries, I explore how waithood manifests across different stages of the migration journey, from aspiring migrants in Cameroon and Ethiopia to those already living in South Africa.
I analyse waithood through a gendered lens, highlighting the unique experiences and challenges faced by young men and women. By adopting a long-term perspective, I demonstrate that waithood is not a static state, but rather a dynamic process characterised by motion and change, and hinged on different temporalities of instant, short term and distant futures depending on migrants agency and network. I show how young migrants actively navigate and negotiate their waiting periods, shaping their experiences and adapting their strategies in pursuit of their aspirations.
This paper argues that waithood is not limited to the pre-migration phase, but extends throughout the migration journey, encompassing various forms of waiting (instant, short-term, and distant futures), and uncertainty. These experiences are shaped by factors such as imagined futures, migration networks, and the enduring power of hope. Despite its challenges, waithood can also be a period of significant productivity, fostering collective action, resilience, and strategic planning.
Ultimately, this research sheds light on the complex and dynamic nature of waithood, revealing how young migrants navigate uncertainty, maintain hope, and actively shape their futures in the face of challenging circumstances.
Keywords: waithood in motion, phases of waithood, aspiration, imagined futures, South Africa and Cameroon