The panel examines relations between generations in contemporary African settings. The emphasis is on the creativity of inter-generational relations: how people make and use links, and how they understand generational differences as resources and affirmations of life even though they are also marked by conflicts, opposition and misunderstanding
The term generation suggests two kinds of social relations and two notions of time. On the one hand generation is about offspring and biological time— parents, children, and grandchildren within a domestic or family sphere. On the other hand, generation refers to age cohorts: those born at about the same time or living in the same period and thus sharing historical circumstances and experiences. In both senses, generation is about connections as well as differentiation. Classic anthropological research in Africa focused on relations of succession within the family and, in some parts of the continent, on age sets. In this panel we return to these concerns to examine relations between generations in contemporary African settings. The emphasis is on the creativity of inter-generational relations: how people make and use links, and how they understand generational differences as resources and affirmations of life even though they are also marked by conflicts, opposition and misunderstanding.
The paper highlights changing inter-generational commitments after the implementation of democratic national law and under conditions of extreme impoverishment. Inter-generational commitment is one fundamental base of society. In the case of the central-khoisan speaking Khwe in West Caprivi in north-eastern Namibia inter-generational commitments are said to have been organised in a way that juniors owe respect and services to seniors in exchange for being supplied with food and other necessities for life. Democratic national law, however, gives equal rights to adults of whatever age. Traditional and modern understandings of how individuals should behave towards each other are arguments in current negotiations of inter-generational relations. In the process, faithfulness to tradition becomes an argument in itself and traditional values and practices are also termed ‘law’. This happens under economic conditions which leave parents incapable to provide their children with the necessities for life and thus without material bargaining power.
Young people in Accra are pressing for new ways of loving. They call for a kind of love that can emancipate itself from the practice of polygamy. And they call for a type of marriage based on “romantic” love that is free from the financial and emotional pressure of their “extended family”, e.g. parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts whom they are expected to support. These “new ways of loving” are linked to rhetoric of modernisation of family life that rejects traditional ways of life in general. It is part of the identity of a new and young generation. New Protestant churches are the carriers of these modern ideals of love and marriage. They combine this rhetoric with educational programmes for newly-wed or soon to be wed couples.
Do these new ways of loving really represent new ways of life? In other words, which social practices are linked to this ideology? My hypothesis is that the relationship of the youth to their families and regions is simply being interpreted in a different manner rather than being rejected. There is reason to believe that such rhetoric of family renewal has been known since the arrival of Europeans and since modernisation has set in. To what extent are the aspirations of the youth for future love and life different from the experience of their parents and grandparents? How are relations between young spouses in love in towns and old people in the rural areas? How are bonds reconstructed between young and old? How does this new ideology of love and marriage alter intergenerational exchange?
My paper shall explore these issues against the background of changing notions of childhood and youth in urban as well as in rural Ghana. It is based on an eight-month-fieldwork in Accra as well as in Asin Endua, a village in the Central Region of Ghana.
The presentation is based on my experiences with a nascent movement of working children in Zimbabwe, affiliated to the African Movement of Working Children and Youth, which claims to be a child-led movement. There has been debate in the field of development studies about how far participatory methods can go, but the issue has received little critical attention in the area of child participation, currently popular among people working with vulnerable children. Facilitators of movements of working children aim to give children training and space to conduct their own affairs, and to make their own decisions concerning their strategies and policies. In practice, however, supporting adults have essential roles to play and make many strategic decisions for the children to follow. Discourse on child participation can, on occasion, masque adult manoeuvring. This presentation looks at some of the ambiguities and contradictions that arise between the roles of children in the movement and supporting adults in reaching decisions.
This paper describes the relationships between older African and Coloured people and their children in the context of socio-political and economic changes in South Africa after 1994. The author’s anthropological study in the townships of Cape Town shows that these relations are often characterised by conflict and struggle, and result in redefinition of kin relations and social roles. The author presents ethnographic data that show the historical roots of the intergenerational tensions and conflicts. She will argue that those tensions and conflicts have been present in the past, but recently are articulated in ‘everyday violence’, ‘rhetoric of complaint’ and competition between generations. A case study of a cultural important space – the house – is used to illustrate the process of changing relationships and crisis, and to discuss the strategies both – older and younger people – use in response to this intergenerational crisis.
Old age is almost universally associated with wisdom. Anthropological fieldwork in a rural community in Ghana confirms this stereotype. Older people love to portray themselves in proverbs that emphasise the precious gift of wisdom handed over to the young. Their life experience is believed to be indispensable for the next generation. Young people, school pupils for example, confirm that ideal image of the wise old grandparent. One of their favourite sayings was 'Unlucky the house without an elder'. Such a family would miss the advice and experience of an older person. Oral statements, both by the young and the old, painted a picture of harmonious continuity between the generations. Old people transfer their knowledge of the past and their life experience to their children and grandchildren. The pain of dying is softened by the knowledge that their children inherit the dearest ‘property’ of their life and continue to benefit from it.
Observations and in-depth conversations showed, however, that this optimistic expectation often merely was a strategy to keep up the appearance of mutual respect. Older people complained privately that the young were hardly interested in their stories and experiences and that they were 'taking their knowledge with them to the grave'.
These ethnographic observations are placed in the perspective of psychological theory that ‘wisdom’ does not so much consist of knowledge but rather of an attitude to knowledge. Wisdom is scepticism towards one’s own experience, the art of ‘relativizing’ one’s own life. Wisdom may be more related to character than to (old) age.
Wisdom as an intergenerational gift shows itself in the older person listening to the young and taking interest in their stories rather than in the stories of the older person himself.
Who takes care of the old?
Recent research has shown that extended families living together in one compound are no longer the dominant feature in West Africa. Mainly in the urban context, the model of a nuclear family, which has been spread by media, school and other state institutions, is superimposing this pattern. The research will aim at the consequences this spatial separation of the generations has on the economic situation, the social status and the generational relations.
The actual demographic distribution of large families within the country and abroad and of certain types of families will serve as the basis. Analysis of family budgets, transfers of money and goods between generations and especially between urban and rural households will show the economic aspect of this change. Are there any other institutions, such as the state, churches or village communities, providing means of support for the old? Or does the family continue to take care of the grandparent generation in spite of the changing family patterns as is assumed.
Changing social concepts of age and status of elderly people may convey the normative impact. Work-biographies and behaviour of parent and child generations towards their own ideas of old age will be regarded. Within that frame the national discourse about development and modernity may be interesting to look at.
Inter- and intra-generational relations within contemporary African settings are often seen and described under the perspective of change. Singular ‘factors of change’ as the introduction of formal education, the appearance of HIV or the emergence of new religious movements, and their implications on generational relations are thus analysed and described. Despite these aspects of change, there are also aspects of continuity in intergenerational relations - sometimes even resistance against new influences.
The Mokollé live in north eastern region of Benin. Within the rural areas of this region the relations among “elders”, “adults” and “children” can be described as a result of the interaction of old and new economic, social, religious and political structures. This interaction causes continuities as well as disruptions among and within the generations. Using the example of a household with three generations in Fouet, a Mokollé village, these ambiguities will be discussed. In this setting the introduction of Islam and of formal education are seen as factors of change whereas the institution of social parenthood and traditional religious beliefs and practices are seen as factors of continuity or even resistance.
Over the past decades, many forces of social change have impacted differently on the social relations between children, adults, and the ageing population. Part of this change has impacted on children’s social and material living conditions in different ways and created conditions for mobility. Conflicts, opposition and misunderstanding between children and the elderly mark the social relations and intergenerational relatedness.
In this paper, I shall describe how discipline and feeding arrangement as household resources have changed over the generations and created various forms of relatedness and children mobility.
Luo popular music produced in the 1990s provides a creative and multivocal commentary on morality, gender relations, tradition and modernity, migration and mobility, as well as nostalgia and social change. Distributed on cassettes and in live performances, it is heard in minibuses, in bars and hotels by the side of the road, in local marketplaces and discos and during the night of dancing that is organised by young people before a funeral. People of all ages enjoy these songs and many of the young people know the lyrics of the popular hits by heart. In this paper, I examine some of these songs and consider how their messages, particular those about love, mobility and loss in the era of AIDS, speak to the experiences of the young people among whom I lived during almost two years of fieldwork in a rural part of western Kenya.
The concept of generation addresses issues of social differentiation and stratification, and concomitant interrelatedness and dependence. In the context of kinship focusing on generations means looking at rankings of and links between people through the lens of procreation. In the context of alternative mechanisms of socio-political organisation, such as age-grades, a generational focus implies looking at rankings and interdependencies that cut through families and links people through their being categorised as of similar age.
In both contexts the question is whose lens we are looking through, whose ranking we use. In the context of the family sphere, to what extent does a child, or parent or grandparent for that matter, view oneself or another as a generation linking with other generations? If someone says ‘my generation’ does that not immediately imply crossing the boundaries of family spheres? In the context of generations as social stratification based on age, one may also ask to what extent and under which conditions ‘belonging to a generation’ becomes a subjective experience.
My interest lies in the use of ‘generation’ as a social mechanism of control and resistance in present day African societies. In Southern Africa the HIV/AIDS crisis has given rise to renewed interest in traditions and rituals that regulate access to sexuality. Swaziland has been hit especially hard by the epidemic, and girls and young unmarried women, form the major risk group. In 2001 King Mswati III decided to reinstate the Umcwasho, a social institution joining non-married girls in vows of chastity which is based upon the Swazi categorisation of women in age classes and is related to the yearly Reed-dance that celebrates femininity and fertility. His intervention was generally received negatively, both within and without Swazi society. External reactions varied from ridiculing the decision as backward or the pointing out of practical problems, to accusing the authorities of blaming women for the HIV/AIDS crisis and infringing upon their human rights.
In my contribution, I will first shortly describe the historical and present day role and functions of age grades and accompanying rituals in Swaziland. The focus will be on the question why the use of traditions concerning age-grades as resource to protect young women from AIDS fuelled so much resistance. I hope to show that it is exactly the blind eye to a generational perspective on sexuality that lead insiders and outsiders to (mis)understand the intervention only in gendered terms.
In an urban Tanzanian setting, teenage mothers were often criticized, attacked and rejected by parents and grandparents. Closely following 31 very young mothers through pregnancy, birth and the first year after, the study shows how problematic the advent of a new generation can be and examines the strategies for dealing with these difficulties.
In this paper the implicit intergenerational contract – based on reciprocity between the generations – is discussed. The old age of the majority of women and men of the lower class in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, is not ensured anymore. The continuous economic degradation during the last decades has two consequences, which destabilize the intergenerational contract: first, the generation of the elderly of the lower class had no financial possibility to either enable their children a good formation nor to build a house or to save some money – all preconditions for the financial support of the young for their parents. Secondly, many young people are unemployed or just get a small income and are thus unable to fulfil the intergenerational contract. Additionally, a new „social security arrangement“ is appearing: the reversed intergenerational contract – the elderly take care for their grown-up children and their grand-children. It will be shown why conflicts between the generations are enforced on this background. These theses are based on data from a North-South research project titled „Local Social Security and Gender in India and Burkina Faso“ (2000–2003), financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF and the Swiss Development Cooperation SDC.
The era of AIDS has produced new intergenerational links. For the past 25 years this epidemic has been an existing ‘feature of life’. Four generations are affected, the youngest being the children who are orphaned. In Nshamba, situated in one of the poorest district of Kagera (Tanzania), children try to accept the loss of their parents. In this process, many others –members of the extended family and community- are involved in both negative and positive ways. Mourning rituals, which have been there for generations are slightly changing to give more support to the children who are directly confronted with death (for example, parents were willing to inform their children of the fact they were going to die).
The extended family still is the most important social network. Yet, migration and the significance of a nuclear family have increased in decades. Children might rediscover the importance of intergenerational links through the support network of the extended family. Grandparents; uncles and aunts: in one-way or another, children will change their perception towards these people after the loss of their primal fosters. Referring to fieldwork done in North-Tanzania, children’s daily life experiences, struggles and construction of social relationships during orphan hood will reveal the way and reasons (i.e. emotional, material satisfaction) why children compile certain intergenerational relations.
Since a decade Tanzanians use the critical term Bongo or ‘cunning’ to speak of their country. Bongo hip hop, widely aired on the radio, is fairly unique on the continent in projecting its emancipatory aspirations on broad sections of society. One of its secrets is to deal with the position itself of the criticist, ominously anti-social according to Tanzanian standards. Bongo rap does so by identifying with kizazi kipya, a ‘new generation’, which combines a large dose of irony with the rediscovery of the grandparental ‘heart and call’ epitomised in the figure of Nyerere and recognised in the contemporary artist’s inspiration. While the lyrics morally side with the elderly eking out a living in the village, they deconstruct the pragmatic politics and neoliberalism of the parental generation as traumatised products of the postcolonial epoch.
Of the elderly the rapper however expects one thing, that they sacrifice the immunity granted by the mzee code and become dingi, a joker, a liminal figure pivotal in youth’s search for social change. What is the implication for the intergenerational cycle of social exchange, which has been under heavy strain in postcolonial Africa? More theoretically, are age-categories like shades of colours blended in the one palette called culture, or do they form consecutive generations with cultures of their own? Pointing to the global relevance of the postcolonial condition, I will argue that generations have since the 1960s increasingly ‘co-developed’ beyond the limits of one society.