Grappling with Emerging Adulthoods

__Abstract__ This study is about subjectivities of young people and about coming of age in a frontier town, Beitbridge, in southern Zimbabwe. The study is motivated by the growing attention to African youth as a social-demographic group and a social phenomenon since the late 1990s in the context of unprecedented economic dislocation. The latter has seen young people resorting to livelihoods largely seen as illicit, immoral and anti-establishment such as activities in the grey economy and sex work. As young people take matters into their own hands, policy makers have tended to use essentialist arguments according to which young people’s behaviour can be understood as a result of age and hormonal changes. This study uses a constructivist and interpretivist approach in which youth is socially created and the behaviour of young people is understood as embedded on its socio-economic, cultural and political context. These approaches are complementary and allow us to question what is taken for granted such as what is assumed about youth and also account for the dissonance between norms and deeds (Yanow 2006:19, Gergen 2000:50). By studying young people’s subjectivities in growing up, the study sought to capture lived experiences of the young and how economic instability impinges on growing up

Youth lyrics, street language and the politics of age: Contextualising the youth question in the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe

Debates about the effects of the 'cultural nationalism' that has accompanied the so-called 'Third Chimurenga' in Zimbabwe since 2000, often portray youth as pawns of officials - for example, as national youth service trainees or as government sponsored artists - rather than as among the worst affected by recent developmental crises, who are struggling against the odds to survive. Yet concern about youth restlessness did, in part, lead to policies, such as the requirement of '75 per cent local content' for public broadcasters, which created opportunities for youth action and led, in turn, to the development of a new musical style known as 'urban grooves'. However, in 2007, Zimbabwean public radio and television banned the airplay of certain 'urban grooves' songs because of their unsavoury lyrics. In this article I analyse the lyrics of these songs in order to argue that together, the songs' lyrics, and their ban fromairtime, point to emergent intergenerational tensions. Some of these tensions revolve around emerging forms, uses andmeanings of vernacular languages. Whereas the 75 per cent local content policy imposed by the government in 2001 envisaged an anti-imperialist popular culture through the use of vernacular languages and local media products, youths used vernacular languages to highlight intergenerational sex differences in heterosexual behaviour. They used street language not ordinarily accessible to adults, to deliver an incisive critique of adult sexual excesses. As observed elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, not only do the banned songs provide an insight into youth subjectivities amidst the social contradictions of Zimbabwe's socio-economic and political crises, they also illustrate how popular music can be a form of civic participation

Making Ends Meet at the Margins?: Grappling with Economic Crisis and Belonging in Beitbridge Town , Zimbabwe

Officially, reference to regions of origin and ethnicity as criteria for accessing resources is seen as divisive and a threat to the social entity called Zimbabwe. It is a reminder of the violence of the post independence era which some would rather forget and others wish to remember as a moral debt which is paid only through revisiting history, apologies to wronged parties and other means of redress (see Werbner 1995). Within this context this paper looks at the emergence of notions of locals and outsiders; deserving and undeserving, entitled and non entitled people in the impoverished town of Beitbridge whose most salient resource is the border with South Africa which is perceived to be a harbinger of wealth through work, theft or the use of zombies and goblins believed to increase one’s wealth

Juggling with land, labour and cash: strategies of some resilient smallholder irrigators

A position paper on the major challenges of a smallholder irrigation farmer in Zimbabwe.Researchers on irrigated agriculture in Zimbabwe have often lamented the low productivity in smallholder irrigation schemes, citing inadequate resources on the part of farmers. According to Rukuni (1984c) farmers often lack sufficient money and labour to deal with irrigated agriculture. Many irrigators have dryland plots which they continue to cultivate during the rainy season. At the same time these farmers have to be seen to be doing work in their irrigated plots. Many farmers’ children are in school most of the year and are not in a position to assist on the plot. Furthermore, irrigation means double cropping in any given year and this places heavy demands on a farmer’s resources. These factors, according to Rukuni (1984c) seem to obliterate the possibility of irrigation schemes realizing their full potential as projected by planners and scheme designers. Projected production levels are often set with little consideration for the local situation, that is, without taking into account the local pressures and realities with which people have to contend. These projections are therefore unrealistic. Rukuni (1984c) sees the unavailability of money for buying inputs and hiring labour as the main impediment in production, overlooking the possibilities which social relations bring into the production process. The social arrangements available to farmers offer alternatives, especially through exchange and other transactions which allow people to produce even when they lack cash. For instance, farmers with labour or draught power may not have irrigated plots but can exchange these resources for the use of irrigated plots for a specified time. This means that irrigation farmers can produce even when there is no money. Such arrangements are often not visible. Neither do they easily lend themselves to quantification