Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Ute Röschenthaler
(JGU Mainz)
Mamadou Diawara (Goethe Universität)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- NB005
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel explores through ethnographic field studies the life of youth in African cities, the realization of their plan for the future, the transformation of their skills in different social and geographical contexts and how their experiences and world views relate to mobility and cosmopolitanism.
Long Abstract:
Most of the fast-growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa are inhabited by migrants, who often have been born somewhere else or live there only for a few generations. The percentage of youth among them is high. Youth in particular have to face the question of how to make their future. Many of their inhabitants imagine the city as a springboard for further ventures in the country or abroad. People come and go and this makes cities a melting pot of diverse experiences and skills. This workshop intends to explore ways by which youth make a living in cities, what they consume and how they organize their lives. It is interested in knowing more about how the skills that youth have acquired in one place are transformed in a new place and find their way into different social contexts in Africa and beyond; in which way their experiences and hopes for the future take shape in their imaginaries; what ideas, skills, and objects the youth bring from rural areas or other places to the cities and vice versa; and in which way their experiences relate to cosmopolitanism. We invite contributions that discuss answers to these questions and illustrate them with dense ethnographic field studies that might help to dissolve the boundaries between city and countryside, between home and foreign country and between mobility and immobility.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ann Cassiman (University of Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I look into how friends organize themselves into ‘bases’, particular spots where friends meet daily in Nima (a zongo in Accra). The paper scrutinizes how bases inspire youth to think of another future, beyond their own neighbourhood, turning the zongo into a cosmopolitan hub.
Paper long abstract:
In Nima, one of the zongos of Accra, a densely populated migrant neighbourhood, groups of young men and women meet on a particular spots in the public space, to chat, play and wait, while dreaming together of a better elsewhere. In these so-called 'bases', that often have prolific names such as 'Chicago' or 'U2canfly', friendship alliances are forged which help youth to think of another future, outside the neighbourhood.
In the fourties and fifties, when Nima started to grow from a temporary settlement for Muslim migrants into the crowded locality it is today, 'bases' used to be places where competitive or conflictual relations of migrants - initially strangers to one another- were soothed. Gradually however, bases transformed into springboards of an intensive international -sometimes virtual- mobility. The paper brings the biographies of several young men and women and their ventures into new worlds beyond their own zongo: in transnational trade to Japan and Korea, in international (fake) marriages or transatlantic travels, and in the cyberworld. It is propounded that Nima youth are not only transnational in their (historical and kinship) biographies, but that they turned the zongo in a social, economic and cultural hub where new forms of city-ness are invented in very cosmopolitan, though sometimes imaginary or virtual, ways through what I call a 'Western-Union cosmopolitanism'.
Christian Ungruhe (University of Passau)
Paper short abstract:
By highlighting the rural-urban connections among young male labor migrants in Ghana I aim at depicting the meanings and future-orientation of urban misery and disillusionment and move beyond popular conceptualizations of youth in a state of ‘Waithood’.
Paper long abstract:
At first sight, today's young rural-urban labor migrants in many West African cities may fit perfectly well into what Alcinda Honwana has conceptualized as a state of "Waithood": facing a massive decline of money-making opportunities, an increasing disconnection from a modern youth culture and a fear of not being able to meet parental and peer expectations at home they seem to be excluded from social participation and mobility. However, by taking a group of northern Ghanaian male youth working in the informal load carrying business in Accra as an empirical example, I aim at depicting the limits of "Waithood" and show how this concept is based on a constricted urban perspective which excludes other possible approaches (e.g. rural and rural-urban) that could draw a more nuanced picture of today's young generation beyond social exclusion and immobility. I will show how the experience of miserable and disillusioned working and living conditions in the city nevertheless implies a promising future-orientation towards the achievement of individual goals. It is upon return to their rural home communities that most youths are able to negotiate higher social positions with peers and parents and thus give meaning to their seemingly disappointing urban experience. Far from romanticizing "village life", this rural-urban perspective depicts the future-oriented meaning of disillusion in the urban context beyond a state of "Waithood" and identifies the epistemological limits of this concept.
Franziska Jenni (University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
Young photographers in Bamako are on the move: within and beyond the city, between social milieus and photographic genres. This paper looks at how young photographers make a living and express themselves within the urban photographic landscape.
Paper long abstract:
Bamako looks back on a long and strong photographic history. Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe - two of the most celebrated African photographers worldwide - lived and worked in this city. With others they left behind an important visual legacy of the changing everyday city life, which unfolded around them between the late colonial and the first decades of independent era. With the inauguration of the continent's oldest biennial of photography in 1994, Bamako's photographic landscape transformed itself: different institutions for promoting photography were initiated and a small group of photographers started to engage in so called art photography. In the shadow of Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe younger generations of photographers started their careers.
This paper considers the youngest generation of professional photographers in Bamako and how they try to get by and express themselves within a professional field that is contested by new digital technologies and a strong competition in a country that finds itself still in a political, economic and social volatile situation after the coup in 2012 and its aftermath.
This paper presents selected works and discusses how three chroniclers of today develop visual perspectives on the city of Bamako and beyond by moving back and forth on the urban rural continuum.
Susann Ludwig (University of Leipzig)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation elaborates on how university graduates in Mali’s capital city Bamako act in uncertain present contexts. It will be demonstrated how they are preparing today for the futures they imagine – or, put differently, how graduates are “opening up la chance”.
Paper long abstract:
More than 10 000 students graduate every year from the Universities of Bamako, Mali. They grew up with the claim that studying is a privilege and the promise that education secures employment and, therefore, a livelihood. However, they encounter severe difficulties finding a job that corresponds to their qualification or entering the labor market in general. That situation impacts their today's actions as well as their imagination and planning of their futures.
This paper elaborates on two questions: what do graduates do today? And to what extend are their present actions geared towards the futures they imagine? One answer lies in what Malian graduates refer to as "opening up la chance". La chance is a phenomenon graduates are preparing for today. "La chance" separates the present from the future since it enables a different present - a present that has been imagined as the future in the past.
The ideas presented are based on three periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Bamako during which biographical and narrative follow-up interviews were conducted with thirty university graduates. The long-term character of the study enabled an understanding of graduates' social contexts, their present actions and their pathways into the future. It is ultimately seized how futures develop and are being developed.