Gendered constructions of citizenship: young Kenyans' negotiations of rights discourses

Abstract

This paper contributes to the study of citizenship by interrogating how young people in Nairobi (Chege and Arnot 2012) perceive their rights of citizenship. It builds on previous analyses of the connections between gender, education and poverty's poor urban settlements by focusing on the political dimensions of the young people's lives. The findings are based on in-depth interviews with 24 young men and women (mainly siblings aged 16–25) from 18 urban households which explored how they define their national identity and citizenship rights and their expectations of the Kenyan government. All youth felt a connection with the Kenyan nation and actively engaged with rights discourses, but secondary schooled youth demonstrated a noticeably more reflexive and challenging approach to the norms and responsibilities of citizenship. Young men focused on the public sphere, emphasising voting rights, political corruption and their role in leading community change, whilst secondary educated young women recognised the importance of ‘freedoms’ associated with national membership, their rights to choose within cultural traditions and the need to support their families. Gender is shown to play an important role in framing their understanding of themselves as citizens.

Acknowledgements

This paper reports on some of the data collected for the project Youth, gender and citizenship: An inter-generational study of educational outcomes and poverty, within the RECOUP programme of research (2005–2010) funded by the Department for International Development in the UK. We thank the young people in Kibera, their families, and the community as well as team members Sara Ruto, John Mugo, John Nderitu, Francis Likoye, Purity Mumbi in Kenyatta University, Kenya and Antonina Tereschenko at the University of Cambridge. The views expressed here are those of the authors alone.

Notes

Torney-Purta et al.'s (2001) and Torney-Purta's (2002) study of 28 democratic countries did not include Africa.

Hall, Williamson and Coffey (1998) define citizenship as an etic term when it is used as an external vocabulary to assess young people's successful move into the social majority, and an emic term when young people use the vocabulary of citizenship themselves.

The RECOUP project ran from 2005 to 2010 and was based in urban and rural settings in Kenya, Ghana, India and Pakistan. See http://recoup.educ.cam.ac.uk/ for relevant working papers.

A flying toilet refers to the unsystematic disposal of human waste using plastic wrapping that is dumped in the neighbourhood.

Towards 50:50 men and women governing together is promoted by the Gender and Governance Programme in Kenya with numerous partners [e.g. the Education Centre for Women in Democracy (ECWD), Womankind Kenya, Kenya Women Political Causes, Young Women Leadership Institute]. The role of gender in acquiring citizenship status has become a major concern among women's organisations including the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), the Law Society of Kenya and the League of Kenya Women Voters (1992/1997) (see Wainaina, Arnot and Chege 2011).

Some of the young men we interviewed described such familial duties, and also the dependency on them of their siblings for educational support or of their mothers.

For the history of youth in democratisation see Mwangola (2007).