Dealing with diversity: African youth research and the potential of comparative approaches

Abstract

While African youth now feature among the most-researched phenomena in African Studies and Africa-focused social sciences, scholarship continues to shy away from the field's most daunting challenge. As the oversized analytical category ‘youth’ cannot tame the diversity and the ambiguity of the phenomenon ‘youth’, it remains difficult to develop tangible theories and reduce the fuzziness that characterises the current debate. In this paper, I review the most recent advances in the field of African youth studies and outline three comparative approaches to respond to the methodological challenges of diversity and ambiguity. Demonstrating how these comparative approaches can be used for youth-specific inquiries on different levels, I argue that comparison is effective in urging researchers to connect theory, methodology and empirical data more explicitly, to pay particular attention to the respective contexts that mark young people's attitudes and behaviour, and to address diversity as a puzzle rather than a ready-made answer.

Keywords:

• youth
• ethnicity
• generation
• identity
• youth culture

Notes

1. While different in style, aim, and line of argumentation, my guest blog post on http://matsutas.wordpress.com/ (Philipps 2013c) contains a few ideas that this paper addresses in detail.

2. Interestingly enough, it was Mbembe (1985, 5–6), whose pioneering work on African youth ‘Les jeunes et l'ordre politique en Afrique noire’ opened by the caveat that, as youth researchers, ‘we find ourselves confronted here with a fragmented universe which […] cannot be thought of in a unequivocal and easily generalising way, as if it formed an indissoluble entity’ (my translation)

3. For example, Newell (2012, 10) remarks that ‘urban cultural productions such as fashion, slang, and genres of music and dance do not belong solely to the city that spawned them’ and, that ‘the village is ‘remotely global’, interconnected in intricate and intimate ways with wider cultural worlds’ (citing Piot 1999; see also Robinson 2011; Utas 2003)

4. Importantly, Pickvance (1986, 176) cautions comparative researchers that, in what he conceptualises as plural causation, ‘the same phenomenon can occur for different reasons or causes in different cases’ (emphasis in original).

5. In Theory from the South, Comaroff and Comaroff (2012, 47–48) seem inclined to pit theory against empirical research, advocating a ‘return to Theory’ to oppose the ‘re-embrace both of methodological empiricism and born-again realism’ in the global north. My interpretation of the matter would be that empirical and theoretical research are fundamentally interdependent, and that each should support the other in countering the tendency of treating Western concepts and realities as the source of meaning for realities in other parts of the world (see Goody 2007; Mamdani 1995, 1996; Mudimbe 1988).

6. This is also exemplified by President Museveni's successful rap attempts in Uganda (see Schneidermann 2013).

7. I take this opportunity to point out that Sommers (2011, 296) misquotes youth bulge theorists Cincotta et al. when reproaching them for asserting ‘that young men are ‘inherently violent’ (Cincotta et al. 2003, 44)’ – the actual text reads ‘more prone to violence than older men, or than women’.