YOUNG

Ghana, like a number of other African countries, witnesses an increasing number of smaller independent Pentecostal churches founded by young pastors. These young pastors engage in pastoral careers as a way to achieve social mobility. It is an attractive career path for many young people as it offers opportunities of ascending religious and social hierarchies in a situation where the more conventional modes of achieving success, through education and employment as civil servant, are decreasing.

By exploring the careers of young pastors, the article discusses how this particular group of youth are innovative and entrepreneurial in the sense that they create spaces, where they can build up status and where this status is socially recognized. At the same time the young pastors are dependent on more senior pastors in order to make a career. This points to the importance of approaching youth from the perspective of generational dynamics. The argument is that in order to become successful pastors, young people have to engage in complex relations of dependency and at the same time be innovative. A religious setting, like the small independent Pentecostal churches, enables young people to be involved in and transcend these generational relations by drawing on powerful religious repertoires of invoking and claiming access to divine powers.

This article is interested in the intellectual contributions of the youth to Kenyan public life. It focuses on what has been called the ‘Redykyulass Generation’ as a contemporary generation of politically engaged youths who have successfully used various genres of popular cultural productions and media platforms to engage with Kenyan social imaginaries. Using three case studies — the Redykyulass group and the writings of Binyavanga Wainaina and Parselelo Kantai — the article examines this generation’s ongoing reconstruction of what constitutes knowledge and its contributions in shaping Kenyan public life, while critically engaging with what can be termed the ‘geronto-masculine’ texture of Kenyan political and intellectual public life. The study suggests that the Redykyulass Generation has variously fractured certain conventions embedded in the socio-political terrains of Kenyan public life, while attaining both social relevance and popularity in Kenyan social imaginaries.

Like many other African countries, Kenya has a large and growing youth population. Some of the youths are mobilized into militant and political networks; one of these is the Mungiki movement. The article explores Mungiki’s combination of politics, religion and Kikuyu traditions. Using the examples of snuff tobacco, revolutionary talk and generational exclusion, it is argued that one way of understanding the connection between the various elements is to look at specific youth practices that cut across apparently separate activities. This reveals that youth in the Mungiki discourse is a highly gendered concept.

Youth employment has jumped to the forefront of the international development agenda, especially with regards to stabilizing so-called fragile states. Liberia is a case in point. Here post-conflict stability has been cast as deeply connected to the issue of youth idleness. The objective of the article is first to show how the provision of jobs and the idea of youth employment is given paramount importance for the stabilization of fragile post-conflict states like Liberia and the achievement of a ‘liberal’ peace. In what way precisely does unemployment constitute a problem? Is Liberian youth jobless? What about the place of informality and hustling in the livelihood strategies of youth? I address the issue of unemployment, security and the role of ‘informality’ in the lives of youth drawing on ethnographic material. I use one of my informants, Adonis, to situate and contextualize the discussion. The intention is to turn upside down the bureaucratic gaze that categorizes youth merely as ‘unemployed’ and show the way in which Adonis, like thousands of other youngsters, engages in the ‘informal’ economy.

In cutting-edge conflict theory, ‘young men’ are framed as a potential source of violence and insecurity in underdeveloped countries, especially in the so-called ‘failed states’. Supposedly, ‘young men’ bereft of socio-economic opportunities constitute a dangerous sub-population which can easily be recruited by ‘Spoilers’, or warlords when the pursuit of personal gain through the use of violence is rational; that is, in situations where the state has failed and therefore has no monopoly over the means of violence. Drawing on fieldwork among the Maï-Maï of South Kivu, I challenge the notion that the young fighters of the Maï-Maï were easily lured into the militias because they lacked other exit strategies. Recruitment actually followed a much more complex pattern. The young Maï-Maï fighters were either forcefully recruited or joined voluntarily for one or more of the following reasons: in order to exact vengeance on the ‘enemy’, for personal protection; to fight for national liberation; to protect a given community; for the right to enjoy the spoils of modernity; and to recast a disempowered and humiliated self into a vigorous and virile subject. In this article, therefore, I argue that recruitment into a non-state armed group was a question of ethics instead of the machinations of a universal instinct secretly at work.