What does it mean to study children and youth in Southern Africa’s past? What does a history of childhood and youth in Southern Africa look like? How has the experience of childhood and youth in Southern Africa been shaped by the region’s changing social and political formations? How might the history of childhood and youth cause us to rethink the history of this region?
These questions were at the heart of a workshop titled “Histories of Childhood and Youth in Southern Africa: From the Precolonial to the Present,” held on July 1–2, 2024, at the Bloemfontein campus of the University of the Free State. The workshop represented the first attempt to bring together current and past research on age, generation, children, and young people in Southern Africa. The meeting included almost thirty scholars, whose work encompasses nearly every state in Southern Africa and touched on developments from before European settlement to the present. Historians of Southern Africa have written seriously and extensively about children and young people since at least the 1960s, reflecting the significance of generation in precolonial African studies, and the pivotal roles played by youth in anti- and postcolonial struggles. This workshop sought to put this rich scholarship into conversation with more recent, global scholarship on the history of childhood.
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, an anthropologist of youth sexuality at the University of Pretoria, opened the workshop with a keynote which emphasized the significance of care in research on children and young people. Indeed, the question of care—how childhood is defined in relation to care and how care mediates relationships between children, young people, and adults—was threaded through every panel at the workshop. In papers on histories of intellectual disability and school health services in South Africa, Liz Thornberry and Kelsey Lemon considered how questions of health and disability defined which children were considered deserving of care—and the degree to which that care might constrain or disempower both children and their parents and guardians. Jeff Schauer explored how children were encouraged to care about environmentalism and conservation in postcolonial Zambia, Julie Partsch looked at how the children of anti-apartheid activists in mid twentieth-century South Africa were taught to care about the struggle. Some presenters also turned their attention to how researchers exercise care and the ethics of conducting research into children and young people: Chama Kaluba argued for the careful use of colonial and missionary archives in excavating pre-colonial childhoods in Zambia, and Nhlakanipho Zulu discussed the care with which he addressed the violence inflicted by youth gangs in 1950s and 1960s on their community in Alexandra township near Johannesburg.
Ishita Pande, an historian of law and age in South Asia based at Queen’s University, Canada, opened the workshop’s second day with a keynote in which she observed that the archives of the global south render impossible any assertion that there is a universal experience and conceptualization of childhood. Indeed, implicit in every paper was the understanding that who was historically considered a “child” or a “youth” depended on circumstance. In a panel on enslaved children in the Cape Colony, Eva Marie Lehner, Kate Ekama, and Benjamin Crous each addressed the difficulty of ascertaining both who was a child—given the fact that adult African men and women might be referred to as “boys” and “girls” in the colonial archive—and were treated as “children” (an idea associated increasingly with whiteness in the nineteenth century). Although that panel dealt with the Cape’s early colonial history, it was informed, as were all sessions, by an acute awareness of how powerfully the past shapes the present—a theme particularly well represented in Júlio Machele and Aly Calhoun’s presentations on the centrality of youth to state policy in Mozambique under both colonial and postcolonial rule.
Many of the presenters commented on how their experiences of childhood or of parenting informed their research, both in terms of topic and their approach to their material. In a powerful panel on twentieth-century child work and labor, Nathan Moyo and Chikwava Siguake both addressed an “earn and learn” system implemented by the Tanganda Tea Estates in south-eastern Zimbabwe in the early 1930s, and still in place in the early 2010s. Both Moyo and Siguake made clear that children and their parents chose to participate in a scheme which paid for children’s schooling while they tended tea plantations, for a variety of reasons over a long period of time. As Moyo argued, the quality of a Tanganda Tea Estates education is demonstrated by the large number of high-profile Zimbabweans who were graduates of the scheme. Simplistic narratives of children as being either victims or heroes under these circumstances do not capture the full complexity of this particular example of children’s work.
The workshop’s title refers to “histories” of childhood and youth, and the workshop showed, precisely, that there is no one experience of childhood across the region. The field of the history of childhood and youth becomes richer and more complex when it includes as wide a diversity of scholars as possible—including those who live and work in the global south, and whose scholarship is acutely shaped by their own lives. With calls to “decolonize” our curricula and scholarship across the globe, it is imperative to take seriously the politics of knowledge production, and to find ways to bring these regional and local perspectives into the growing canon on histories of childhood and youth. These questions will animate our conversations as we compile an edited collection of papers from the meeting, which highlight the vitality of the field in Southern Africa.
Rebecca Swartz is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the Free State. Jared McDonald is Senior Lecturer in History and Chief of Staff to the Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University of the Free State. Sarah Emily Duff is Assistant Professor in History at Colby College.
The authors wish to thank the University of the Free State Directorate of Research Development for the generous funding to sponsor accommodation and funding for workshop participants from the region; and SHCY for the workshop grant.
