The African Union (AU), in its Youth Charter of 2006 (African Union 2006),¹ defines youth as those in the age demographic of 15–35 years. The reasoning of the AU in having quite an expansive categorisation of youth is unknown, but a good conjecture leads us to conclude that this may be rooted in the social perspectives of youthhood on the continent. Despite this, the definition does not necessarily grasp the unique nature of youth in Africa and the particular conditions on the continent that prevent young people from truly embarking on a life of adulthood.

The majority of young people in Africa appear to be stuck in a kind of limbo between adolescence and adulthood – a period that Alcinda Honwana has explored further through her study of ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2013). This is a period that is characterised by the lack of socioeconomic opportunities that youth on the continent have been facing since the immediate post-independence era, due to unemployment, poverty, environmental degradation, authoritarian excesses of the state and violent conflicts. This volume goes beyond waithood to discuss what can be described as ‘youthhood’. Youthhood has to do with the fact that sometimes, despite their age, some people get permanently regarded as youth by their families and society, due to poverty, illiteracy and their consequent lack of social status. Being a youth then becomes limitless in terms of age and becomes much more about socioeconomic standing in society, the lack of agency and a dependence on family and society.

Youth in Africa is a contested identity that attracts a plethora of meanings and interpretations. What constitutes youth is too often an academic exercise in futility. The meanings vary across the continent. It has not been helped by attempts of international organisations and states which, for the sake of legality and ease of identifying different sections of the population, engage in certain chronological categorisations of who are youth or young people. Determining which categories of the population constitute youth has nonetheless been challenging, as it carries different meanings in different societies.

The first major international attempt at defining who a youth is took place in 1995, following previous reports of the Secretary General to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, with the latter adopting the definition of youth as persons between the ages of 15 and 24.² This attempt appears to have been for statistical purposes and has been the framework for UN agencies and member states since. The UN did not bar the member states from adopting their own definitions of youth, as the UN definition does not meet the contextual realities of many societies, even those outside of Africa.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) adopted a common age bracket of 15–29.³ Africa too has attempted to find common ground around the definition of youth. However, these attempts have not led to a consensus, as various countries maintain different age categorisations of youth.⁴ The fact that the AU definition is more expansive than previous others is interesting but could not have been more germane to the continent’s appreciation of a youth. It might, then be useful to restrict our understanding of youth through the legal and statistical categorisations for the purposes of ‘who can be considered a youth?’ Yet this does not explain how these categorisations are operationalised within the public and private spheres of society.

Another important dimension for the categorisation of youth is the physicality of the word and, consequently, its gendered aspect. For the most part, a youth is generally viewed from a social and functional lens as an able-bodied person who exudes the strength and agility to deliver for his or her family and community. Societally it is through this same lens that youthfulness is sometimes associated with masculinity (Jaji 2021). When the call for a show of strength is made, young girls are often shielded, while the boys take the lead. In most communities, this social construction resigns girls to gendered roles such as cooking, cleaning homes and fetching water. Women often have to shoulder the “triple burden” - reproductive, productive and community management, due to being sequestered in traditional gender roles. This prevents them from reaching their full economic potential. The men work in the fields, build the roads, clear a tree from the road and participate in battles. The masculinity of youth, while it may sometimes overlap with chronological age categorisations, does not rely on it.

Youth is sometimes also perceived from a socioeconomic perspective, and this makes for the way it is regarded less as a stage of life between infancy (meaning dependence on parents or elders for livelihoods, instruction and guidance) and that of adulthood (independence of thought, economic survival and leadership). This perception is epitomised in Sierra Leone’s linguistic register of ‘youth man’, or Nigeria’s ‘area boys’; someone who may be idle, jobless or poorly socialised. It can sound derogatory in most cases when one is referred to as a youth, but the reality is that society tends to perceive young people who are in need of social and economic assistance, and who rely on older members of their society, as youth, even when they may have gone beyond the age bracket. Too often, this excludes educated, employed and socialised young persons from what is in the public imagination of the meaning of youth.

The difficulty of what appears to be a statistical and operational approach to the categorisation of youth on the continent may raise serious challenges in terms of legal responsibility. The strength of an individual does not necessarily connote an age of responsibility. The problem with categorising young people below 18 as part of a bigger family of youth reinforces the social construction of youth as people below adulthood, who may have the energy but lack responsibility. This may perhaps explain why countries like Nigeria opted for the lower cut-off age of 18, signifying an age of responsibility. If youth is an overlapping stage of life that cuts across childhood, adolescence, adulthood and the aged, national policies may not be able to appreciate that stage as a political or socially relevant force within society with its own interests, aspirations, attributes, needs and challenges, since some of those in that overlapping stage are either seen as children or adults of young people in the continent have displayed agency and a sense of purpose by enrolling in higher education and investing in their futures, the gulf between education and actual job opportunities is vast. Compounding this are the power structures in many African states that concentrate sociopolitical power in the hands of a select number of metropolitan and local elites, who bargain within what Alex de Waal has described as the ‘African political marketplace’ (de Waal 2009). Power is bartered for political and economic favours, and those without such resources are excluded from governing systems. In the face of these complexities, young people have exercised their autonomy by responding to their environment in a variety of ways. Some do become involved in the burgeoning criminal networks that facilitate the ‘shadow economy’ of the continent by joining militias or finding recourse in extremist politics (de Bruijn & Both 2017). Many others turn to more legitimate forms of income and moderate politics, involving themselves in the vast informal sector or choosing more creative outlets for their politics and ideology (Diouf 2003; Eze 2015). This failure to provide a clear definition of youth may be not unconnected with the continent’s historical experiences of a malignant relationship between young people and those who emerged to govern post-independence Africa.

Thus, in many ways, African youth operate on the outside of the formal socioeconomic and political structures that define statehood. There is minimal youth representation in the elite political class of Africa, and young people instead occupy subaltern spaces, influencing change through protests, volunteering or working in grassroots civil society organisations (CSOs), joining militias or gangs in the urban regions, or simply emigrating and, instead, becoming a part of a growing diaspora that seeks to help their cause from outside the physical borders of the continent (Hodgkinson & Melchiorre 2019). The vast majority of African states have, over the years, steadily marginalised the youth and kept them out of major political representation, centralising power and refusing to break the tradition of a gerontocratic political elite. This has not only robbed African youth of the chance to cultivate an active civil society that could make legitimate demands of its state but has also instilled a sense of deep mistrust in the youth against the regimes that govern them. State–youth relations have evolved over the years to reach their present state, and to better understand the nature of the relationship between the elites and the youth in Africa, we must examine that relationship since the immediate postcolonial period.

This ‘Africanist School’ that rose to prominence during decolonisation amongst African student leaders and scholars considered traditional community beliefs and governance structures as backward and not conducive to development. Nation-building was of paramount importance at this stage, and looking towards the governance infrastructure of the West, nation-building was seen as a project that should be undertaken alongside the former colonial powers (Mamdani, Mkandawire & Wamba-dia-Wamba 1988). In this immediate post-colonial period, popular mobilisations amongst the general populace against the newly independent state were considered disruptive as the focus was on building a strong state, with strong institutional foundations from which to embark on independent sovereignty. Creating safeguards for a healthy and politically involved civil society itself was not a major priority at this time, and in the majority of states, sociopolitical power was concentrated in the hands of the university trained and educated elites; the youth demographics that were not particularly urban or well educated were invariably excluded from nation-building.

With the focus on building a strong state in the hopes that it would foster rapid development, infrastructure projects and economic policies were concentrated on the centres of power in African states, often neglecting the regions outside the physical spheres of influence of capital cities and relegating rural and borderland development to the periphery. This physical isolation of regions on the periphery translated into t...