Abstract
How young people physically move around their cities and villages on a daily basis has serious implications for how they access or are restricted from using basic services such as schools, hospitals or employment. Their daily movement is also a deeper indicator for how free or curtailed young people’s lives are and how they can traverse public spaces for their personal leisure and pleasure. These questions about young people’s daily mobilities take on a particular salience when thinking about sub-Saharan Africa because in many African countries, more than half the population is made up of children and young people under the age of 18.
Given this profound and fundamental role of daily mobilities of young people, it is a topic that has largely escaped development scholars and policymakers. However, Gina Porter’s new book, Young People’s Daily Mobilities in Sub-Saharan Africa, provides an important corrective to this lacuna. This book approaches the issue of everyday mobilities and experiences from an interdisciplinary perspective by combining perspectives from anthropology, geography, sociology, African studies and transport planning. It looks not just at the daily mobilities of young people from their home to schools and places of work, but also at factors that restrict such movements and what consequences they could have for the youth peoples’ futures. The book builds on a series of field studies conducted intermittently over 40 years in various rural and urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa but focuses on Ghana, Malawi and South Africa.
Throughout the book, the authors make it clear that social power relations play a central role in how mobility is socially structured, embedded and coded, thereby shaping the ways young people move or are restricted from movements in their everyday lives. Here, studying social power relations is demonstrated as crucial to understanding how the complex politics of mobility operate in the African context through a comparative lens between the countries and various rural and urban sites within them. The core chapters of the book look at the politics of mobility in transport, play, work, health and education wherein factors such as gender, age, socio-economic conditions and household compulsion are shown to shape mobility potential and practice as well as immobility.
Within the field of development studies, and particularly for development practitioners, the approach of this book is a significant shift away from conventional development thinking and conceptualizing. In the book, human and social experiences are foregrounded, and dimensions of everyday life in the global south (often overlooked in conventional development interventions) are made centre stage. As Porter explains, these neglected phenomena require a detailed and systematic look at how factors such as uncertainty, witchcraft or ambivalent experiences of love, aspiration and belief, shape and play out throughout the life course of young people, and critically mediate their mobilities. Understanding these is crucial for developing more transformative and effective policies. In this light, the detailed and deep ethnographic experiences of the book not only show the very personal aspects of social life in developing countries, but also reveal how these are often deeply political issues.
I focus on two such issues from the book: The realm of ‘play’, for example, is an activity which takes place in the lives of young people beyond the realm of work and school. Through ‘play’, young people form social networks, pleasure is sought and the overall well-being of young people is enhanced by moving around various spaces. From rural Malawi, the authors show that play among young children of both genders is equitable and similar in the early years of their life, when young boys and girls interact freely and spend time playing with each other in their village. However, after the ages of 13, as young girls reach puberty, they are not given permission to play outside and their movements in public spaces are largely limited to fetching water in groups with other young women or playing within or near the compound of the house. Fear of their rape is very considerable in the region and the sexual activity of young women has to be controlled before marriage. Hence, parents enforce strict boundaries on mobilities young girls and social norms and gendered relations directly alter the mobility of young girls. Interestingly, the study finds that girls from poorer families are allowed more freedom because of the economic needs of the household which requires women of all ages to work in public spaces.
Similarly, the act of walking from one place to the other is a field of great power and inequalities when thinking about young people’s mobilities in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors demonstrate that among young people in both urban and rural areas, the fear of human, supernatural or animal hazards, apart from traffic and infrastructural issues, shapes how young people walk. For example, the fear of pythons in the river that children have to cross or of stray dogs who could be infected with rabies, affects how boys and girls walk. For girls in particular, such fears are compounded by the fact that groups of young men and boys often stand around mocking girls walking. As a response, women often walk in groups because that is safer; they end up taking longer routes to avoid bushy areas and quieter spaces. Similarly, for young boys, particularly in urban areas, harassment from bigger boys who try to steal money or other men, who are high on cannabis, means that walking alone poses several dangers. Recommendations around denser school networks, better transport connectivity to address unmet health and employment needs, or the reduction of domestic load carrying to conserve physical energy are some of the important ways in which these challenges can be addressed.
The main strength of this book is its ability to apply anthropological knowledge beyond its disciplinary boundaries to discuss it in more applied ways that will be useful for development practitioners. This is not an easy task and one that anthropologists often shy away from. Hence, this book makes for a fascinating read by stretching our understanding of how such social experiences can be understood through a policy and programmatic lens. In doing so, the authors successfully traverse the extra mile by doing the leg work to make social and cultural anthropological research—relevant and applicable beyond the academy. For a development studies’ ethnographer like myself, the book is an important attempt at revealing how data that are often nebulous and difficult to categorize, such as fear of walking in particular parts of the city, have important consequences for how policymakers and urban planners ought to think about the various spaces and young people’s mobilities within them.