Read more
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.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Age and Generation.- 3. Enslavement and Unfreedom.- 4. Race and Childhood.- 5. Schooling and Education.- 6. Work and Play.- 7. Politics and Violence.- 8. Conclusion.
About the author
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.
