This textbook introduces readers to the academic scholarship on the history of childhood and youth in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial eras. In a series of seven chapters, it addresses key themes in the historical scholarship, arguing that age serves as a useful category for historical analysis in African history. Just as race, class, and gender can be used to understand how African societies have been structured over time, so too age is a powerful tool for thinking about how power, youth, and seniority intersect and change over time. This is, then, a work of synthesis rather than of new research based on primary sources. This book will therefore introduce mainstream scholars of the history of childhood and youth to the literature on Africa, and scholars of youth in Africa to debates within the wider field of the history of children and youth
This book is essential for anyone interested in the history of childhood and generational dynamics in Africa. This synthesis of a diverse and complex literature makes a strong case for the significance of age and generation as an analytic framework for African history. Duff has done a superb job of humanising the experiences of children by using fascinating, carefully selected case studies. It is both highly sophisticated and extremely accessible. Clive Glaser, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa This book balances an approachable historical overview with conceptual analysis of age, gender, and generation. Featuring insightful and diverse case studies drawn from oral traditions, memoirs, interdisciplinary scholarship, and other literature, Duffs parallel discussion of ideologies and experiences of childhood and youth demonstrates why Africa matters to these debates. Corrie Decker, University of California, Davis, USA This textbook introduces readers to the academic scholarship on the history of childhood and youth in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial eras. In a series of seven chapters, it addresses key themes in the historical scholarship, arguing that age serves as a useful category for historical analysis in African history. Just as race, class, and gender can be used to understand how African societies have been structured over time, so too age is a powerful tool for thinking about how power, youth, and seniority intersect and change over time. This is, then, a work of synthesis rather than of new research based on primary sources. This book will therefore introduce mainstream scholars of the history of childhood and youth to the literature on Africa, and scholars of youth in Africa to debates within the wider field of the history of children and youth. S.E. Duff is Assistant Professor of African and World History at Colby College, USA. The author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), she is a historian of age and gender in nineteenth and twentieth-century South Africa and the British Empire.
AbstractThe Women's Enfranchisement Association of the Union of South Africa (WEAU) was founded in 1911, only a year after the declaration of the Union of South Africa. While scholars of the South African women's suffrage movement have paid particular attention to the race politics of the WEAU and its allied organisations, comparatively little scholarship has focused on white suffragists' claims to citizenship. This article addresses this scholarly lacuna and argues that the South African women's suffrage movement's demands for citizenship were entangled with a broader project to reform and modernise the South African state. In so doing, the article explores how members of the WEAU imagined what it meant to be 'South African' in the 1910s and 1920s, and particularly in relation to their framing of citizenship as a tool for shoring up white supremacy in South Africa.
"This is the first book to trace the history of childhood and youth in nineteenth-century South Africa. This book examines how childhoods changed during South Africa's industrialisation in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, it considers how the Dutch Reformed Church--the only organisation to evince any sustained interest in colonial childhood--attempted to mould, particularly, white childhoods. The book then traces the colonial state's increasing interest in the education and welfare of white children from the 1870s onwards, positioning this concern within a wider context of debates over poor whiteism and an emergent Afrikaner nationalism. Concluding with a discussion of the 1895 Destitute Children Relief Act, the book suggests that this legislation was the first attempt in the Cape to define precisely who a white child was, and what should constitute a white childhood. Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony opens up the history of childhood and youth in South African historiography, and contributes new ways of understanding not only the region's industrialisation, but also histories of ideas around race, poor whiteism, and domesticity"--