This paper serves as an introduction to the Special Collection on "Youth, the Kenyan State and a Politics of Contestation". It focuses on youth and the heterogenous ways this social category responds to inordinate state action. Specifically, we foreground the role that the Kenyan state has played in the construction and subsequent politicization of Kenyan youth in a variety of ways across time and space. In elaborating this main contention, this introduction frames the six papers in the Special Collection within a threepronged argument: First, while we present youth as heterogeneous social category, we argue that their similiar experiences of state surveillance and violence warrant analyzing them through a comparative lens. Secondly, we reject ahistorical renderings of youth politics often presented in youth bulge studies, arguing that such analyses have served to both disregard and delegitimize the political grievances of Kenyan youth and flatten the diversity of their political activities. Finally we call for an approach to the study of youth politics, which seeks to expand 'the parameters of the political', taking oft-neglected informal spaces of youth political activity as important discursive and material sites of investigation. In taking these spaces seriously as objects of analysis, the papers on offer here are able to provide a more nuanced assessment of youth as political actors, which problematize reductive dichotomous narratives of youth politics that pit resistance against co-optation.
Scholarship on student activism in Africa has tended to be understood according to broader historical periodizations of elite African politics. This has largely been because of student activists' historical claims to be 'aspirant elites' (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 172). As such, scholars have explored student activists' role in anti-colonial nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, anti-structural adjustment and democratization protests since the late 1980s, and more recently in the resurgence of 'Fallist' student protests in South Africa (Nyamnjoh 2016; Booysen 2016; Heffernan et al. 2016). This special issue challenges these periodizations by exploring the histories of student activism during the era of decolonization immediately before and after independence. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, unlike the first generation of nationalist leaders who had refined their emancipatory anticolonial politics on campuses abroad, African students in the era of decolonization did so through geographies that spanned both foreign institutions and newly created African universities. Inspired by Marxist-Leninism and Pan-African solidarity, these students often came to embrace transformational revolutionary politics during their university experiences. In many instances, their own expectations and political activities would come to challenge, upset and dramatically contest the designs of newly independent African states. The articles collected in this special issue, and first presented at a workshop entitled 'Student Activism Reconsidered' at the University of Oxford in July 2016, seek to develop understandings of African student activism during this critical period by revisiting postcolonial Africa's first student protests and experiences of university life. Many of the debates that these students initiated on campus would come, in subsequent decades, to be rearticulated on the national political stage through former students who went into prominent public positions or who set up or entered governing or opposition parties. As such, appreciating the ideas, behaviours and dreams that these people adopted during their university experiences can provide important insights into how they responded, as professionals and political leaders, to the challenges of economic crisis, structural adjustment and increasingly repressive authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s. From its inception as a form of subjectivity, African university studenthood gave its members a 'cosmopolitan mobility' over social and spatial orders that opened up a new sense of political possibility (Ivaska 2018
In May 1984, the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi introduced a National Youth Service pre-university training programme (NYSPUT) for prospective university students. The programme was designed to instil discipline in Kenyan university students and inculcate them with a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Moi regime prior to their arrival on campus. This article argues that, in practice, however, the scheme had unintended consequences: it served to alienate student recruits from the ruling party and helped radicalize a small but vocal group of student activists, who, when they arrived on campus, confronted the Moi state with some of its most defiant political challenges of the 1980s. Relying on extensive interviews with former student recruits and archival research, this article highlights the key role that the NYSPUT played in shaping Kenya's young generation of 1980s student activists, who represented one of the most united and militant student movements in the country's history.
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