Temporalities of waiting in Africa

Abstract

Ethnographic accounts of Africa in the late 20th century described a continent in which people were seemingly waiting endlessly for a future that would not come (Ferguson 1999; Piot 2010). Driven by normative temporal narratives of modernity and development, citizens and states imagined linear incremental movements through time. From individuals who envision better lives through work, education or migration, to larger community’s agendas for collective empowerment, to government’s long-term visions of national renewal, Africa has been rife with expectations for the future. For both states and citizens, the realization of these multiple futures is routinely delayed and often indefinitely postponed, creating a stark divide between expectation and reality. Across the continent a sense that the future is an elusive good and the present is a chronic state of waiting emerged in the aftermath of neoliberal structural adjustment policies that accelerated inequality, poverty, unequal resource access and marginalization (Ferguson 2006). Perhaps more than any other area, it is in the lives of youth that scholars have examined the gap between expectations of progress and a reality of stagnation (e.g. Archambault 2012; Cole 2004; Hansen 2005; Mains 2012; Masquelier 2005, 2019; Weiss 2009). Youth not only wait for economic development, they wait for maturation and growth in their own lives, as they struggle to attain normative expectations for the life course and become adults. In the face of persistently unmet expectations, many young people have experienced frustration, disillusion, despair or apathy. Scholars have attempted to conceptualize this experience of youth with the notion of ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2012). Attributed to a combination of persisting structures of gerontocratic and patrimonial rule and of economic pressures under neoliberal capitalism, the effects of structural adjustment, in particular, waithood describes the involuntarily prolonged adolescence of (mainly male and urban) youth grappling with issues of poverty, underemployment, access to education and, more generally, social and political marginalization. Deprived of access to the resources needed for attaining markers of social adulthood (i.e. stable income, marriage, family and household formation), youth are effectively put in a state of prolonged waiting that generates feelings of boredom, frustration and shame (Mains 2007, 2017; Masquelier 2013; Schielke 2008). Studies of expectations of development and youth waithood in Africa follow similar logics. Through engagement with modernizing discourses, like formal education, Africans have