1.
Children in the African Postcolony: Sentinels of the Imaginary
B056488
August 2015
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of
Master of Science in Social Anthropology
School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh

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Abstract
Despite frequent castings as ‘objects of culture’ or passive, agency-less members of society,
children occupy powerful positions within society as agents of culture. Children in the
African postcolony, due to their unique temporality as children and the complex temporal
experience of the postcolony, are striking examples of children’s ability to traverse social
spaces available almost exclusively to them. In this dissertation, I argue that due to their
unique position in the social representation of time, heightened by the particular experience
of time in the postcolony, children in postcolonial African states stand sentinel on the frontier
between ‘reality’ and the social imaginary and are subsequently able to cross and re-cross the
border to the social imaginary as unique agents of culture.
Keywords: children, time, temporality, postcolony, imaginaire, social imaginary, Africa,
social anthropology

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Table of Contents
Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………1
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………….2
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..3
1. The child and children in the anthropological arena…………………………………..6
1.1. The child in anthropology
1.2. What do we mean by ‘child’?
1.3. The Euro-American export of childhood and the child in postcolonial Africa
2. Time and the temporality of children………………………………………………….16
2.1. Linearity and the unilineal: time and social anthropology
2.2. Emerging time, near future, and la durée: time and the postcolony
2.3. Beings in the present, beings of the future, beings in between: postcolonial children
and the imaginaire
3. Accessing the imaginary………………………………………………………………..26
3.1. The ‘African state’: gerontocracy and the myth of the postcolony
3.2. The imaginary as a reclamation tool: overcoming violent past-presents-futures in
Cameroon
3.3. The dark side of the imaginary: allegories of cannibalism and witchcraft in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………….36
References…………………………………………………………………………………...39

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Introduction
It was a night replaying its corrosive recurrence on the road of our lives, on the road which was
hungry for great transformations.
- Ben Okri, The Famished Road
Some years ago, I found myself sheltering from the shade of the blistering Sahelian
sun in Kehehe, a rural village in the north of Niger. I spoke with my fifteen-year-old friend
Hadja, the only person who did not immediately bore of my pidgin Hausa-French
communication, and a couple of other older women who were taking a break from pounding
millet. We began to speak about Hadja’s upcoming marriage. Hadja at fifteen years old was
already a strong matriarchal figure within her small compound. The children of four different
wives (of two husbands) clung to her throughout the day. She prepared their meals and
scolded them as an authoritative figure, yet also engaged in imaginative play and games with
them without the reluctance one might see from an ‘adult’. On top of this, Hadja held many
‘adult’ responsibilities, at least in my twenty-one year old American view. She did the
shopping at the market for her family by herself (including the cumulative six mile trek to
and from), worked in the fields, pounded millet, pulled water, took care of her siblings, sewed
clothes, and made calabashes. At one point, I commented that Hadja was significantly more
‘adult’ than I was at fifteen, and she laughed. ‘Takina’ she chortled, ‘I’m a child. I won’t be
an adult until I get married!’ followed immediately by a request to play pretend: ‘Come!
Let’s go play wedding with my cousins. They will do your henna!’ What’s more, Hadja
expressed to me that the only remorse she had about her upcoming marriage was that she
would lose the ability to be ‘free’. I would learn that freedom to Hadja meant that as a child
she was afforded unique mobility and rather unrestricted comings-and-goings as long as her
responsibilities were met. The immediate transition into the social category of adulthood
upon marriage is indicative of Hausa as well as other cultural conceptualisations of female
children (Cooper 1997, Mayblin 2010), but this conversation with Hadja nonetheless lifted
the veil to an aspect of Nigerien reality that I simply neglected to pay attention to: the
position of children and their particular abilities to move between and through social norms,
taboos, and spaces in ways that their adult counterparts could not.
In 2002 Lawrence Hirschfeld published a now infamous article titled ‘Why Don’t
Anthropologists Like Children’ in American Anthropologist. Amongst many strains of
argument, he criticizes anthropologists for failing to incorporate children within their research

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and for the inability to create a systematic framework and methodology by which children
can be integrated into anthropological theory from a child-centred perspective. This
dissertation will not attempt to outline a functional anthropological methodology for working
with children, a currently a trending pursuit (cf. Bluebond-Langer and Korbin 2007, Johnson
and Pfister 2014, James 2007, Warming 2011), but it will strive to fall in line with another
trend in the anthropology of childhood by adding to the argument that children should no
longer be cast into the Euro-American paradigm of quintessential passive, innocent objects of
culture. Rather, children are unique agents of culture, possessing particular abilities to
traverse social spaces often inaccessible to adults. In this dissertation, I argue that children,
and particularly children within the entangled interlocking pasts, presents, and futures of
postcolonial Africa (Mbembe 2001), due to their distinctive temporality as ‘beings’,
‘becomings’, and ‘inbetweeners’ (Uprichard 2008, Carsten 1991) are singularly positioned at
the border and frontier between the social reality and the social imaginaire with agential
capacity to navigate between the two. This agency stems from their abilities of ‘crossing and
recontextualizing the boundaries between seemingly contradictory elements’ (De Boeck and
Honwana 2005: 10), which arise from the unique temporal experience of the postcolony. In
doing so, children prove to be unique not in the sense that they are lacking of the formedness
or capabilities of their ‘adult’ counterparts, but isolated in their ability to access the social
imagination and reshape their social dynamics. Children in the African postcolony are the
gatekeepers to the social imaginaire, positioned at the frontier between the disjointed
postcolonial reality and the possibility-filled imaginary. They are the ‘institutionalizing social
force through which a society confronts and absorbs changes and mutations, and thereby
defines and authors itself anew’ (De Boeck 2001: 69).
I will begin in chapter one by laying foundations in the anthropology of childhood by
exploring what we call the ‘child’ and how children have featured in anthropological
literature. This will highlight key concepts about the anthropology of childhood, namely how
children have been represented as secondary objects, while also beginning to emphasize the
particular contribution studying children makes. In chapter two I will continue by exploring
the anthropology of time, and how time, the postcolony, and children intersect to create a
compelling, previously unexplored arena of inquiry in which children emerge as unique
temporal cultural agents with the ability to traverse the social imaginaire. In chapter three, I
will explore the present reality of the ‘African state’ and building upon the temporal
discussions, I will dig deeper into elements of the postcolony and children’s position within it

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by examining the social imaginaire and how children are uniquely able to access it as
gatekeepers via two ethnographic case examples: children’s masking ceremonies in Oku,
Cameroon and child witches in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Throughout
this dissertation, I will provide not only theoretical arguments but also ethnographic
references that, though not necessarily focusing directly on children in the African
postcolony, highlight children as agents of culture, as sentinels to the imaginaire - those who
occupy the border posts between reality and the imaginary. Finally, I will suggest what
further direct research regarding children (and specifically research from a child-centred
perspective), temporality, and postcolonial Africa could mean for anthropological theory.

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Chapter 1: The child and children in the anthropological arena
1.1 The child in anthropology
A brief look at the ways in which anthropologists and those who came before them
dealt with children in their research and encounters with foreign populations is essential to
understanding the stereotypical castings of children that I will argue against. Despite
Hirschfeld’s (2002) aforementioned article titled ‘Why Don’t Anthropologists Like
Children’, in which he himself notes the exaggeration in the title, anthropologists have
engaged with children in their research before even anthropology as an academic field
emerged. Missionaries and colonial administrators engaged with the local children at their
posts, focusing on how local populations reared their children in comparison to their Western,
‘non-primitive’ counterparts (LeVine 2007).1
Though frequently cast aside as less significant
and inconsequential elements of field research and data, children were present as cultural
interlocutors from even these early manuscripts. As American anthropological traditions
developed, Franz Boas, in addition to his well-known work with the Inuit and Kwakiutl,
published in 1911 findings regarding human growth and European immigrants to the United
States. In these, he claims that growth in children is influenced not just by the social
environment, but also by our geographical environments that are inscribed upon a person,
opposing previous beliefs and prejudices regarding the influence of race and biology on
development. Boas’s advisees in what would become the American anthropological culture
and personality school, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, also focused research on children.
Though Benedict (1938) published a cross-cultural study presenting data from many societies
to emphasize the varying effects of culture on child development, Margaret Mead was the
first anthropologist to focus her work almost exclusively on children.
In 1928, Mead published one of the bestselling anthropological works of all time,
Coming of Age in Samoa. In it, she directly challenges Euro-American essentialism and
universalism by questioning the prevailing notions about adolescence in the United States
influenced by psychologist G. Stanley Hall – that adolescence is a period of struggle and
conflicted transition. After conducting research with young female Samoans, Mead argues
that this is not the case; adolescence is freer, less repressed in Samoa than in the over-
1
I use the term ‘Western’ to refer to an Enlightenment-influenced school of thought that echoes Euro-American
values such as individualism and liberalism and the emergence of modern capitalism. As I recognise there is no
monolithic ‘West’, I will use the term Euro-American for the remainder of this paper to indicate, in broad terms,
the influence of this hegemonic cultural system (cf. Latour 1993, Weber 2005).

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stimulating American society. Following the success of this book, Mead continued to focus
on children in her 1930 Growing Up in New Guinea where she explores child rearing,
development, and the life worlds of Manus children. Despite criticism regarding the validity
and, supposedly, fabrication of her fieldwork (notably Freeman 1983, though Shakman’s
2009 meticulous outline of the debate moves towards redress), Mead’s concern with cultural
relativism, her at-the-time controversial view on sexuality, and her work with children caught
the attention of the American public during a time when concerns regarding rearing and
nurturing a family were paramount. Mead pushed childhood and its related categories of
adolescence and youth further into the foreground of anthropological inquiry.
Though Mead, an American, may stand as the symbolic mother of the anthropology
of childhood, it was not only the American anthropologists exploring this topic. Across the
pond in the British school the father of participant observation, largely influenced by
Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual developmental theory, Bronislaw Malinowski also provided
rich ethnographic accounts of children and their subsequent places in kinship and political
systems in his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific. It was in his 1927b Sex and Repression
in a Savage Society and his 1929 Sexual Life of Savages, however that his largest
contributions to the anthropology of childhood reside. In the first, he posits that the Oedipus
complex did not apply in the exact same manner to the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders with
whom he was living, despite Freud’s (1899) assertion that it is a universal phenomenon. In
the second, he builds off of this observation and works directly with Trobriand children
exploring their childcare, sexuality, cosmology, role in social politics, an even hints at a
unique child-culture: ‘such freedom [afforded to children] gives scope for the formation of
the children’s own little community, and independent group...their small republic...’ which is
run ‘very much as its own members determine’ (Malinowski 1929: 53).
Beyond child development, Meyer Fortes (1938) explored the place of children in
kinship and political systems much like other anthropologists, and also focused on how
Tallensi children learn and acquire moral and cultural indicators. Additionally, E.E. Evans-
Pritchard in his 1940 The Nuer and 1953 Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer included
ethnographic descriptions of children and their unique place within society, specifically
highlighting elements of father-child relationships. The interest in children continued, going
so far as to spark questions about anthropologists’ own children in the field and how they
may uncover information hitherto inaccessible to the adult anthropologists (Cassell 1987).
Nonetheless, it was not until around the 1990s that the anthropology of childhood and

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specific, targeted ethnographic studies of childhood boomed (LeVine 2007). Within this
boom calls arose for a child-centred and perspective oriented anthropology of childhood that
could break children free from the frame of universal dependence (James 2007, La Fontaine
1986, Jenks 1996). Much of this upsurge was fuelled by feminist anthropologists, recognizing
the link between children’s indirect representation in anthropological theory with the way
women were commonly represented: as objects of exchange or objects of culture rather than
equally potent generators of complex social realities who occupy a privileged position of
understanding the subaltern within systems of dominance and power (Helleiner 1999, Wells
2015: kindle location 273).
Despite this brief snapshot of the broad base of anthropological interest in children, it
still seems the field is rather limited by a ‘semantic network linking the keywords
‘socialisation’, ‘acculturation’, ‘development’, and ‘stages’’ which continue to define ‘and
limit the anthropological study of children’ (Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1983: 13).
Notwithstanding the increase in child-centred anthropology occurring at present in
anthropology, this limited field is partly as result of the psychological underpinnings behind
many of the former anthropological studies of children. As it is essential to understand the
inseparable nature of cognition and development from the study of children (and arguably us
all), I turn next to a brief outline of the most influential psychological theories that have
influenced how anthropologists have decided to approach engagement with child subjects.
As the psychological underpinnings present within Malinowski’s Freudian
inspirations and Mead’s challenges to Hall hint, children and childhood were also widely
explored outside the field of anthropology. Much of what early anthropologists used for
platforms and methodological frameworks when conducting field research were the
psychological trends of the moment and these trends often centred on children. Children held
a longstanding place in cognitive development studies contemporary to the early
anthropological works on child rearing and child sexuality. With the 1905 publication of
Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and his 1920 publication of A
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, children moved closer to the centre of academic, and
anthropological, attention. In these works, Freud not only outlines the foundational
psychosexual stages of development within which each child must satisfy a libidinal desire,
but also posits that during the psychological development of children they are vulnerable and
highly malleable. This triggered a wave of interest in child rearing practices and raised
questions regarding how children are raised and develop cross-culturally.

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Beyond Freud was the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget was one
of the first psychologists to focus his work specifically upon cognitive development and
children, and outlined that development was not a continual acquisition of knowledge, but
was rather composed of specific, clearly delineated stages (Piaget 1936). According to Piaget,
these stages are universal. Nonetheless, another prominent figure in psychology and cognitive
development, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, challenged the universalism of
Piaget’s theory of delineated stages by stressing the fundamental role that society and social
interaction has on how people develop into cognitive beings. Asserting that Piaget’s theories
inadequately account for cultural differences and that cognitive development itself is vastly
theorized, Vygotsky claims that ‘the problem cannot be solved by using any one formula;
extensive and highly diverse concrete research...is necessary to resolve the issue’ (Vygotsky
1978: 91). Though only two from a large field of psychologists, Piaget and Vygotsky
significantly influenced both psychological theory and social science theory. Eventually,
anthropologists began to break free from the constraints of developmental psychology when
theorizing children, and this fluctuation impacted anthropological theorizing of childhood in
that it began to situate ‘children within the micro- and macro- level socio-cultural and
political economic processes that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the localized patterns of
interaction that play such an important role in the lives of children everywhere’ (Mcgee and
Warms 2013: 108).
The relationship between anthropology and psychology is important to recognize as it
underpins many of the ways in which children were brought into broader socio-political
debates, and it is at this juncture that my essay is situated. As Maurice Bloch notes,
completely separating anthropology from cognition is dangerous; social sciences tend to act
as false ‘liberators’ from the clutches of modern science (Bloch 2012). This paper does not
attempt to bridge the gap between the two, but recognizes the potential fields of knowledge
that that marriage can sow. Furthermore, though Mead, Malinowski, Fortes and the others do
not explicitly strive to break children out of the paradigmatic classification of ‘objects of
culture’ to explore their abilities to become social agents, these anthropological titbits on
children provide a foundation from which theorizing children anthropological literature could
begin and demonstrate that the varied nature of children and childhood cross-culturally. They
also succeed in revealing how children, beyond existing as partial or incomplete objects of
culture, also reveal insights about the culture within which they exist. These works highlight
the simple fact that there is something positively peculiar about children. It is no accident that

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the foremost anthropologists found themselves exploring the position of children in relation
to kinship, politics, education, and almost all social systems. They may not have argued it
themselves, being teased out in more modern anthropological explorations, but their draw to
children as subjects – even as subjects to study rather than informants themselves – hints at
the subverted social worlds and social knowledge that children can provide. Children
‘provide an excellent field in which to illustrate the range of cultural adjustments which are
possible within a universally given, but not so drastic, set of physiological facts’ (Benedict
1938: 43). There is something compelling about the particularity of children, and specific
elements of that peculiarity are exactly what I will tackle in this paper.
1.2 What do we mean by ‘child’?
Critical questions still remain: What is a child? What is childhood? It is now widely
accepted by anthropologists that there is no such thing as a universal child. No universal
‘child’, but there are common similarities between children that drive the tendency to set
children into bounded, distinctive categories. Borrowing the insight of Clifford Geertz who
speaks to ‘becoming human’ in his seminal The Interpretation of Cultures by noting that
‘culture provides the link between what men are intrinsically capable of becoming and what
they actually, one by one, in fact become...we become individual under the guidance of
cultural patterns [and] historically created systems of meaning’ (Geertz 1973: 13), we begin
to unravel some of the defining features of children and childhood. I choose this quote from
the morass of anthropological notions of who and how we are specifically because Geertz
chooses to emphasize becoming. Central to conceptions of children and childhood is the
notion of becoming, the notion of the unformed, incomplete, and the in-between (Carsten
1991, Uprichard 2008). Children are sometimes human, sometimes not quite (Astuti 1995),
sometimes considered cherubs in need of protection from their imminent ‘becoming’ into
adults, sometimes changelings capable of ‘becoming’ problematic or in need of ‘becoming’
something better for society (Lancy 2008). They are, however, always becoming (Conrad
2011). Similarly, the definition of children and childhood is perpetually becoming; it is, as
Geertz notes about the culture that shapes us, historically and socially constructed (Ariès
1962, James and Prout 1997, Mead 1928). To some, though widely challenged, childhood in
the Enlightenment construction did not exist until after the 15th
century (Ariès 1962), to
others it is facing extinction (Postman 1982). What is more, the category itself is highly
relational; childhood and the children experiencing it cannot be fully understood or conceived
without a comparison to the features of their corresponding particular, local adulthoods

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(Wells 2015, Leinaweaver 2007). Further, though children are always becoming, they are
also being (Uprichard 2008, Montgomery 2009, Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998). They
exist as they are in a specific socio-historic context. Though in evolutionary motion, they are
also actors in an immediate present no less than their adult counterparts, but uniquely as
children. The arguments about children and time will be elaborated in subsequent chapters,
but it is important to note initially that children and childhoods as concepts are contentious,
highly debated, but pervasive; they are unavoidable. As such, I suggest, alongside many
others, that there is and can be no universal definition of childhood in the same sense that
there is a universal biological immaturity from which all human beings develop (Benedict
1938, James and Prout 1997) despite the international universal categorisation of a child as
any human under the age of 18 in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child (UNICEF 1989).
Defining the child as anyone under the age of 18 is both inaccurate and limits the
broad categorisations of children across cultures. Children can be children or adults before
birth (Gottleib 2004), they can be considered adults during this defined period of childhood,
and adults by this definition may well be considered children far past the age of 18
(Montgomery 2009). The ‘stages of life’: childhood, puerility, adolescence, youth, senility,
old age (Ariès 1962: 17), though often biologically universal, are not universally experienced
and are malleable, transitory, unique and sometimes non-existent in specific cultural contexts
(Lancy 2008). As Bourdieu (1993) emphasizes, the relationship between social age and
biological age, though not arbitrary, is very complex and varies even within local societies –
both within ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ societies, such as the variant identities of youth
within France. He stresses, referring to categorisation of social age by biological markers,
that ‘it is an enormous abuse of language to use the same concept to subsume under the same
term social universes that have practically nothing in common’ (Bourdieu 1993: 95). The
definition of the child as any person under the age of 18 corresponds to a Euro-American
conception of childhood and a neontocratic society, which, by and large, is entirely unique to
the annals of culture (Lancy 2008: 1). Children are just as socially constructed as they are
biologically constructed cross-culturally (Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998).
Although I would rather not succumb to the Euro-American universalist paradigm of
a child as any person under the age of 18, the ethnographic evidence from ‘younger’ children,
especially ‘younger’ children in postcolonial Africa, is rather limited. In this paper, I will not
attempt to make an explicit distinction between ‘children’ and ‘youth’ as works on ‘youth’

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specifically have informed much of my argument. Deborah Durham (2000) outlines rough
parameters for youth and as they are pertinent to why I will not attempt to make an explicit
distinction, they are worth quoting in full:
(1) those who straddle kin-based, domestic space and wider public spheres; (2) those who
have gained some level of recognized autonomy and take up public roles, but are also still
dependents and not yet able to command the labor of others as superiors themselves; (3) those
who can be expected to act upon their social world and not just be the recipients of action, but
whose actions are often conceptualized as straddling (or linking) the social and a-social
(biological, natural, exotic domains), we conclude...with a very shifty category that seems to
fit many people at some time but no one consistently. (Durham 2000: 116)
Similarly, Karen Wells (2015) stresses that youth is a generational identity that is susceptible
to change and reconfiguration, and one that is frequently exclusively used with reference to
young men. As it can be argued children can fit the many, and fluid, parameters outlined by
Durham, and given the variable nature of the category of ‘youth’ itself, I will not make any
clearer of a distinction, but will refer to ‘children’ for the remainder of this paper. However,
as some of the ethnographic examples that follow may refer to actors between the ages of 3-
18, it could be argued that for certain examples, the actors are more correctly referred to as
‘youth’ rather than children. Still, Wells (2015) also highlights that it is often only when
children become politically active, or start shifting social frameworks, that they are deemed
youth. This implies that once a child becomes a social actor and obtains a certain level of
agency that they are no longer children, and I disagree with this broad categorization. I will
use the ethnographic examples of ‘youth’ to inform thoughts on children and agents of
culture. I do recognise that this still falls somewhat within the Euro-American universalist
paradigm, but as ‘youth’ – as they may be locally defined differently from day-to-day – offer
a bridge to understanding ‘children’ and vice-versa (Argenti 2002), and as there can be no
universal definition of either, I proceed by using the term ‘children’ or ‘child.’
However, by claiming that there is no universal definition of childhood and
emphasizing the discursive, socially constructed, historically contingent and highly variable
nature of childhood I do not intend to write off childhood ‘as yet another postmodern
discursive fiction’ (Stephens 1995: 10). There is unquestionably a uniqueness and potency
about children and childhood that separates them from their ‘fully adult’ counterparts and
provides them with their particular abilities to navigate social spaces inaccessible to those
who do not reside within the same social category. One such way children are unique and

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incongruent to their ‘adult’ counterparts are their positions within society is their stationing at
the frontier or the border of many domains due to their status as inbetweeners, such as age
categorisations or layers of social time that correspond to the social imaginary in the
postcolony. Thus, by taking the postmodern route and tossing childhood as a category would
be unproductive, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro notes regarding the boundless nature/culture
debate, ‘[t]here are already too many things which do not exist’ (De Castro 1998: 470).
Childhood exists, though it exists in context.
Furthermore, the context is the lynchpin of childhood both to the children themselves
and to those that perceive them. Children are inextricably bound to global discourses.
International laws and transnational processes significantly influence their local childhoods
(Leinaweaver 2007, Stephens 1995). As mass migrations, cultural flows, and global cultural
interaction increasingly characterize the lived realities of people (Appadurai 1990), and
identities within this increased globalisation are becoming fragmented, hyphenated, and even
more complicated than before (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995), children often find
themselves at the nexus. Heather Montgomery (2009) notes that ‘studying childhood is also a
way of studying change, and it is often through looking at children’s lives that these changes
become most apparent’ (Montgomery 2009: 234), and as noted by Jean and John Comaroff
(2005), the way children are represented within a society is indicative of much more intricate
details of the society at a whole. What this assumption fails to recognize, however, is the
problem that arises with the muddling of ‘childhood’ due to the Euro-American
conceptualisation. There is a large, and growing, body of literature and marketing from
international aid organisations and non-profits reflecting the concerns about the protection of
the presumed universal nature of childhood: concerns regarding pollution, loss of innocence,
and the invasion or blurring of adult worlds with those of children’s worlds (Stephens 1995).
All of these concerns are embodied within the Euro-American export of childhood.
1.3 The Euro-American export of childhood and the child in postcolonial Africa
The Euro-American conceptualisation of children formulates them as passive,
innocent objects of culture; they are dependent upon adults, and should only function within
the private spheres of society such as the home. David Lancy (2008) mentions this
framework to point out one categorisation of children as ‘cherubs’, and Filip De Boeck and
Alcinda Honwana (2005) emphasize that any child who falls outside of this assumed
normative framework is frequently considered ‘at risk’ or ‘dangerous’. Children within this

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model are often cast as ambassadors of hope and the embodiment of a better future regardless
of how they are conceptualised within local societies (Bornstein 2001). As the Euro-
American framework for children speaks to a mostly Euro-American childhood, it is often
not fully applicable to the children of other countries, specifically those of ‘developing’
nations. Yet, nearly 88% of primary-school aged children live in developing countries while
most influential work with children (especially studies outside of anthropology that do,
however, inform anthropological approaches with children) has been conducted with Euro-
American children using this framework of children as agency-less, dependent beings (Lancy
2008). This ‘neo-liberal export of childhood’ (Wells 2015: kindle location 693) reflects much
of what the 1980s debates on ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986) concerned
regarding the truth in ethnography and the weight of local perspectives, and Allison James
(2007) uses these debates to point out that within this framework anthropologists are
frequently seeking to ‘give voice’ to children, which is a symbol of the modern welfare
state’s commitment to liberal values – the same values articulated within the UNCRC.2
Unsurprisingly, this liberal export casts back to the colonial project where the meaning of
childhood and children’s experiences were indivisible from how colonial administrators rule
over African colonies: children were sought out to reproduce the society that colonial
administrators attempted to create, a society of compliance. (Wells 2015: kindle location 420;
Stephens 1995: 16). The only modern difference is that now it is deemed unfair that ‘modern’
European children have a particular sort of childhood – a childhood where children are
innocent dependents – and ‘populations around the world, in need of ‘civilization’ and
‘development’’ should provide their children with the same, but require the help of the West
(Stephens 1995: 16).
This framework of children and childhood is seldom fully applicable to children
living in postcolonial African realities, which themselves are not monolithic and vary vastly.
Living in strikingly different worlds than their Euro-American counterparts, children in
postcolonial African societies are not necessarily agency-less dependents. Though their
counterparts in ‘developed’ nations may also function as agents of culture, children in
postcolonial realities are uniquely positioned to reshape social realities as they are the ‘opus
2
I recognise the problematic nature of the over-generalised use of the term ‘neoliberal’ within anthropological
inquiry as a descriptive category rather than an unpacked category of explanation (Reeves 2014). I use the term
within this paper with the assumption that neoliberal politics to have a certain thematic unity (privatisation of
public goods and over-financialization of social life) while also manifesting differently within, or appropriated
by local contexts and actors.

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operatum and modus operandi of crisis and renewal’ locating their identities within ‘locations
in which ruptures and fault lines of an African world in transition become manifest’ (De
Boeck 2005: 190). Children in the African postcolony position themselves at the borders and
frontiers (De Boeck and Honwana 2005, De Boeck 2004, 2005, Honwana 2005, Argenti
2005, Comaroff and Comaroff 2005, Gottlieb 1998, 2004) created by these ruptures,
disjunctures, and uncertainties about everyday life. These frontiers, between domains such as
reality and the social imaginary, are ‘edge[s] of space and time: zone[s] of not yet - not yet
mapped, not yet regulated’ where a ‘series of historically nonlinear leaps and skirmishes’
coagulate to create their own cultural productiveness (Tsing 2005: 27, 32). Postcolonial
African children stand guard at these borders, uniquely positioned to access both realms
simultaneously.
At these borders, postcolonial African children distinctly articulate themselves as
makers of society. They are largely shaped by the society in transition that categorises their
existence, but they also shape that reality and, similar to constructs of the Euro-American
model, embody the future in a postcolonial society characterized by scarcity. Far from
inhabiting a label of ‘lost generation’ (Cruise O’Brien 1996), children in postcolonial
societies exist between temporal spaces in ways that their adult counterparts do not and in
ways that ‘developed’ children never will due to the fractures and ruptures often inherent to
the postcolony. Like other children, postcolonial African children’s temporality stems from
their position caught constantly between definitions of childhood, youth, and adulthood in a
category ‘of natural opposition’ (De Boeck and Honwana 2005: 6), but also from their
position within the complex, overlapping pasts, presents, and futures of the experienced time
in the postcolony. This is why these ‘global norms’ of childhood as proselytized by the Euro-
American framework should not be thought of universal categorisations, but rather as ‘ethical
codes or models’ as the ‘universal subject that is at the heart of liberal theory does not and
cannot exist because it presupposes that all humans share the same potential experience of the
world’ (Wells 2015: kindle location 4706). For postcolonial African children in particular, the
experience of the world is mitigated by their specific and distinct temporality. It is to time,
temporality, and how these concepts of rupture and disjuncture in the postcolony uniquely
position children in the African postcolony that I now turn.

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Chapter 2: Time and the temporality of children
2.1 Linearity and the unilineal: time and social anthropology
Time and how people perceive time feature frequently within anthropological inquiry.
However, the ways anthropologists represent these concepts within the literature are vast and
varied. Time is often taken for granted as a given or used as a ‘handmaiden’, an incidental
rather than focal element to other anthropological theories to which it is inextricably bound
(Munn 1992: 93, Hodges 2008: 401). Still, time as it relates to anthropological inquiry is
crucial and has been explored by many of the preeminent names of the field, including but
not limited to: Emile Durkheim (1912), Bronislaw Malinowski (1927a), E.E. Evans-Pritchard
(1939, 1940), Meyer Fortes (1949), Edmund Leach (1961), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966), and
Clifford Geertz (1973). No being is immune to time, however time is perceived (Gell 2000).
Descriptions of time and temporality are themselves temporal. We cannot speak of time
without using temporal terminology, and at no point are we located outside the grasp of time
(Munn 1992). While plunging into physics is well beyond the scope of this paper, it is
important to note a trend in how time has been represented in anthropological inquiry. Time
was, and sometimes still is, represented as linear and/or unilinear where there is only one
assumed direction of progression. History, which is often conflated with time, is depicted as a
linear progression through clear-cut developmental stages – a Morganian (1877) view of
human evolution that has proved somewhat unrelenting (cf. Marx 1859, Engels 1884, Serres
and Latour 1995). In reality, the way time is experienced is not always this simple.
Understanding this linear trend is key to not only conceiving of the reality of postcolonial
social time, which itself is multifarious, but it is also necessary to understand so that we may
posit how children and their own unique temporal plane are able to access social space that is
not as accessible to adults.
Before delving into the linearization of time and history, we first need to briefly
explore the development of time within anthropological theory, and the argument put forth by
Durkheim in his 1912 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life underpins many approaches to
time. Ultimately, Durkheim, as one of the first relativists, argues that linear time is an entirely
Euro-American construction. He posits instead that time, human time cognition, and time
concepts are socially determined; ‘social time’, or the collective representations of time that
reflect structures of social life (seasons, ritual) are not homogenous and ‘personal time’, our
subjective perception of time, contributes further to the heterogeneity of time and temporal

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experience (Durkheim 1912). This heterogeneity of time experience can also be referred to as
temporal relativism (Gell 2000), and the question of its validity birthed an intensely polarised
schism in the anthropological tradition: temporal relativists who, like Durkheim, argue for
variant social times and those who argue for a more universal perception of time. Notable
amongst the relativists were Evans-Pritchard (1939) and Geertz (1973). Evans-Pritchard
outlines Nuer time as separated between oecological (environmental) time and structural
(social) time. Here, the experienced time of the Nuer is both perceived linearly, via
oecological time, but also unique to the Nuer as ‘time concepts are socially determined only
in contexts of intrinsically sociological types of discourse’ (Gell 2000: 225). Geertz (1973)
insists that time is detemporalised amongst the Balinese; therefore, Euro-American linear
time is not universal. Unlike Evans-Pritchard and Geertz, Malinowski’s (1927a) notion of
‘time-reckoning’ argues that activities or rituals are coordinated only in conjunction with
natural events and that social perception of time is not as relative as Durkheim imagines. In
Maurice Bloch’s (1976) Malinowski Lecture he aptly follows a more Malinowskian
conclusion regarding the social experience of time and criticizes Durkheim (1912), Leach
(1961), Geertz (1973) and the social determination of knowledge by arguing time is not
relative; there is a universality to some of the substructures that form the ways humans
perceive time, namely how we interact with nature. This also sparked debate, notably
Bourdillon (1978), Asad (1979), and Howe (1981).
Nonetheless, each account of time, whether from a relativist standpoint or not,
underscores the difficulty in breaking free from a Euro-American social time-as-linear
paradigm which Durkheim criticized, but also a tradition from which he himself, consciously
or not, wrote (Gell 2000, Fabian 1983). While cyclical time is frequently associated with
more pagan or ‘primitive’ time concepts, linear time – the ongoing unfurling from origin to
an unknown future orientation – evolved in anthropological inquiry to represent the ‘modern’
association of time from Judeo-Christian thought (Gell 2000: 256). This experience of time is
also unilineal; it is progressive. It draws its roots not only from a Judeo-Christian origin, but
also from pseudo-Darwinism; there is only one ultimate culmination, end point, or result
from this progressive time. The prominence and authority of this linearization of time
evolved from Aristotle’s physics in which the past is no longer, the future is not yet, and the
present only exists in between the two (Heidegger 1962). According to some anthropologists,
this corresponds to an imperative of capitalist production (Gell 2000: 262, Fabian 1983, Bear
2014) where again progress is central – progression from past, to a transient present, to an

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infinite, possibility-filled future. Still, more recent theories on time within anthropological
inquiry highlight what Jane Guyer (2007: 411) describes as the ‘postmodern condition’ that
results from a time-space compression, borrowing David Harvey’s (1990) term.
Here a cultural emphasis on a limited temporal focus emerges where experienced time
is consistently reduced to the present. Within this ‘postmodern temporality’, a focus on
globalisation and unbounded cultures arises in which cultures are increasingly free-flowing
within a system of flows such as capital and labour (Hodges 2008: 402 quoting Harris 1996,
Stephens 1995, Appadurai 1990, Tsing 2005). These flows, despite any reduction to the
present or time space compression, are nonetheless in a linear flux, such as that of a river
flowing from the past towards the present towards the future (Conrad 2011: 204). This can
lead to a tendency to speak of the ‘past in the present’, or how the past as a singular and
terminal point in time – no longer an active reality – has affected the present rather than
speaking of the past as an active participant in the both the present and the future (Shah 2014:
337, Guyer 2007: 411). Even so, there are exceptions. Bourdieu (1977) uses the framework of
‘pastness in the present’ to attempt to demonstrate non-capitalist linear time (cf. Gell 2000).
Lambek (2008) shows how the past through performance in Sakalava spirit possession
continues and has undeniably real implications on ‘present’ realities, and Bloch (1976)
explains the past, in both Balinese and Aboriginal societies, is real in the present via ritual
communication.
We begin to realise that this linearity and terminal aspect of the ‘periods’ or ‘stages’
of time break down in reality, especially within the reality of postcolonial African children as
will be highlighted by the children engaging in masking ceremonies in Cameroon as well as
the witch-children of Kinshasa. Also, any perception of linearity depends entirely on the
unique perspective of a subject. The past and the future are not different countries from the
present (Argenti 2007), they are active within and felt by the postcolonial African present.
Thus, for the sake of my argument that will follow regarding postcolonial African time
experience, I tend to agree with both Alfred Gell (2000) and Bloch (1976) that though there
exists some real objective time in which all social subjective time takes place, such as Gell’s
A-series time taking place in B-series time, experienced time is unquestionably relative. This
experienced time is the time to which I refer in my arguments. The challenge is then how to
define ‘the scope and import of the relativity’ for ‘the world is a process which goes on in
time; different cultures may posit entirely different pictures of this process...but this leaves
entirely unaffected the schema of time per se, which is logically prior to any specific concept

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of the world-process which is understood to transpire in time (and space)’ (Gell 2000: 257).
By exploring the relative temporality of children within the temporality of the African
postcolony, we begin to unearth a distinctive temporal domain by which the transformation of
society is enabled.
2.2 Emerging time, near future, and la durée: time and the postcolony
This Euro-American paradigm of linear time influences, by imposition through the
capitalist world system and frequent ‘Western’ interventions on the continent, postcolonial
realities and creates both difficulties and creative opportunities. The development from one
stage to the next, past to the present or present to the future, presupposes a hierarchy. As
Akhil Gupta highlights, ‘[t]he image of development, with its hierarchy directionality,
purposiveness, and goal-orientation not only emplots individual lives into different stages,
but cultures and nations as well into primitive, backward, or underdeveloped, developing, and
developing or advanced’ (Gupta 2002: 50). The second issue arises with the conflation of
time and history and builds off of the notion of time as progressive stages of linear
development. History, however, is neither time’s clone moving through a hierarchy of
developmental stages nor is it a teleological unfolding. By conflating the two, where the past
exists in the present as an inactive and inaccessible catalyst, African realities are sidelined as
the quintessential past – ‘Other’ (with Mbembe’s 2001 capital ‘O’) worlds that are stuck in a
developmental stage of non-Euro-American inadequacy and primitivism (Fabian 1983).3
History is not a developmental process, nor is time; they exist actively in the plurality of the
present (Chakrabarty 2000). James Ferguson emphasizes this phenomenon in his 2006 book:
If the postcolonial condition, as some have suggested, is most fundamentally characterized by
a perceived temporal disjuncture (with postcolonial nations and societies imagined as
‘behind’ or ‘belated’ in developmental time), then the de-developmentalization of historical
time promises to leave postcoloniality itself ironically ‘out of date’ not only by ending or
overcoming colonial inequality, but by rendering obsolete that very hope and dream.
(Ferguson 2006: 190)
3
This also echoes ways the category of children was described in anthropology, predominantly during the
colonial period but also beyond that timeframe. Africans were equated with children to reinforce the ‘primitive’
or ‘savage’ labels as children were assumed to have elementary forms of cognitive functions (Lubbock 1865,
Tylor 1871, Stephens 1995, Argenti 2007) This traces as far back as Rousseau, who likens the child to the
‘noble savage’, and this is only possible through a linear indexing of childhood through age and time (Gupta
2002: 50).

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I hesitate to accept that de-developmentalism, or in a sense de-linearisation, of historical time
will simply render obsolete the inequality of colonial and postcolonial realities – especially
because each postcolonial reality in Africa is its own unique entity – but Ferguson
demonstrates how profound the link is between the structural inequalities of postcolonial
Africa and the imposition of linear historical time. He also highlights the prolific tendency of
describing the postcolony in terms of ‘fracture’, ‘disjuncture’, or ‘rupture’ (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2001, Ferguson 2006, Mbembe 1992, 2001, 2002, Mbembe and Roitman 1995,
Argenti 2007, De Boeck 2004, 2001, Bayart 1990, 1995), and this way of experiencing time
in the postcolony is central to the unique temporality of postcolonial children, further siting
them at frontiers, borders, and cracks between to disjointed domains.
As stressed previously, time experience as linear, hierarchical developmental does not
always reflect the manifestation of experienced time within postcolonial realities. Time
experience in the postcolony has been described as closer to an amalgamation of the ‘near
future’ (Guyer 2007), ‘emerging time’/‘time as lived’ (Mbembe 2001), and la durée
(originally Bergson 1889, expanded by Deleuze 1966). Guyer describes the ‘near future’ as
the ‘reach and thought of imagination, of planning and hoping, of tracing out mutual
influences, of engaging in struggles for specific goals...’ (Guyer 2007: 409). Though this
‘near future’ is often described as emptied out, this is only reflective of the difficulty of
accessing the future imposed by progressive unilineal time in the postcolony. Achille
Mbembe describes ‘emerging time’ and ‘time as lived’ as time that is appearing and time that
is not bound synchronically or diachronically but is multiplicitous, simultaneous, and
consisting of both presences and absences. He notes that African time – that may manifest
differently in different locales – ‘is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and
futures that retain depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and
maintaining the previous’ (Mbembe 2001: 16). Finally, la durée is a conception of time
‘consisting of concrete, qualitative multiplicities, which divide continuously’ (Hodges 2008:
410). As such, the ‘‘present’, as a discrete spatialization of time, no longer ‘is’, and no longer
becomes what is ‘past’ when a new ‘present’ emerges from the future to replace it’ (Hodges
2008: 411). Though an oversimplification of the three concepts, the above notions of time
share a key defining element: an active and somewhat nonlinear experienced time where the
past is as much real and affective as the present and future, and where spaces of experienced
time beyond punctuated, linear dates are accessible. The straight line of time may still exist,
but is foldable, breakable, bendable, and blurrable.

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Still, it can be argued that these spaces of experienced time beyond punctuated, linear
dates are also accessible to those outside of the postcolony. As Westerners punctuate their
realities with future-oriented objects such as horoscopes, forecasts, or retirement accounts as
well as memorabilia from the past, are they not accessing the same type of space? I contend
that they are not; there is a distinctive element about the fractured temporality in the
postcolony, a temporality that is characterised by the overlapping of pasts and presents and
futures, that provides us with a new perspective on how people, and in this case children
specifically, relate to the past and the future. This level of temporal blurring and overlapping,
the recognition of an unattainable future and the living in a present imbued with the past, is
not as potent within developing societies as developing societies do not face the multiple
layers of rupture and emphases on necessary progression and renewal that postcolonial
African states face on a daily basis.
The Comaroffs argue that within postcolonial time ‘the ruptures of the ongoing
present, real or imagined, are often associated, in collective consciousness as well as in social
theory, with transgression, liminality, and lawlessness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 2).
Though certainly ruptured, the present temporal experience of postcolonial nations is far from
a perpetual descent into chaos. The aforementioned and emphasized ‘temporal disjuncture’ is
a disjunction of postcolonial nations and societies imagined as behind. This rupture manifests
due to the attempted imposition of linear time via capitalist or neoliberal policies onto
societies that possess discordant different temporal perceptions and, due to the hierarchical
nature, subsequently envisions only one possible future (Gupta 2002, Fabian 1983). This
future is a future in which Euro-American nations forever excel whereas African nations
forever trail behind as if the possibility of attaining Euro-American developmental status is
the epitome of the carrot and the stick. This creates conflict in temporal perception and
difficulties in negotiating or repairing disjunctures that occur. Mbembe and Roitman describe
this ‘immediate present’ (which includes both the past and future) as:
[A reality] defined by the acute economic depression, the chain of upheavals and tribulations,
instabilities, fluctuations and ruptures of all sorts (wars, genocide, large-scale movements of
populations, sudden devaluations of currencies, natural catastrophes, brutal collapses of
prices, breaches in provisioning, diverse forms of exaction, coercion and constraint) that make
up the fundamental experiences of African societies over the last several years. (Mbembe and
Roitman 1995: 324)

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However, though an immediate present may be defined by disjunctures and instabilities, it
does not stipulate that every moment of the postcolonial African reality is experienced in a
state of crisis. Though crisis may underpin reality, seeping through from the past which still
actively asserts itself on the present and looming as a potential unbreakable reality of a
predetermined unattainable future, this state of being nonetheless creates a distinctive and
powerful social space: the social imaginaire. Within this perception of time, time as non-
linear and overlapping – of time as layers that bleed into one another with real consequence
through ruptures and disjuncture echoing crisis - a unique opportunity for postcolonial
children arises. Children have the opportunity to become powerful social agents within this
space by connecting the reality to the imaginary and subsequently stitching a bit of the
rupture This is only heightened by their own unique temporal state of being and beings and
becomings. As embodiments of the future, and as will be highlighted, close in proximity to
the past, they reconfigure ways to relate to experienced time that starts to break the rope
dangling the carrot. They become the sentinels of the imaginary, standing guard at these
complex interwoven crossroads.
2.3 Beings in the present, beings of the future, beings in-between: postcolonial children and
the imaginaire
One element of postcolonial reality that Mbembe consistently stresses is the existence
of the iréel, the invisible, the double aspect of African ontologies. The invisible, the double,
or the unreal is not simply the other face of the visible or the real; they coexist simultaneously
(Mbembe 1992, 1996, 2001). This double nature of African reality is heightened by its
complex temporality. These two worlds sometimes intersect or communicate, and when they
do Mbembe claims it is only ‘through a tight game of complex correspondences and criss-
crossing relationships’ (Mbembe 1996: 146, translation my own). One association of this
invisible reality, this reality that is neither completely real nor unreal, is the imaginary or the
imaginaire. Though the imaginary is technically an element of the invisible, it is what
operates the disjunction between the invisible and the real – a disjunction made possible, and
certainly highlighted, by overlapping temporal realities (De Boeck 2005). De Boeck explains
that the ‘imaginary’, the imaginaire, is a concept with an intricate history tracing to
philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Cornelius Castoriadis, but has
since become somewhat of a catchword for social scientists. Even so, he stresses that the
imaginary is used to ‘capture the ways in which a general subconsciousness, with its
‘autochthonous networks of meaning’, is related to the ruptures and constant alterations of a

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hybridized postcolonial...landscape’ (De Boeck 2001: 69). De Boeck draws heavily from
Bayart on his interpretation of the imaginaire, which is worth quoting in full. The imaginary
is classified as:
The dimension from which issues a continuous dialogue between heritage and innovation that
characterises political action in its cultural aspect. Understood in this way, the imaginaire is
first of all an interaction...that is, an interaction between the past, the present, and a projected
future, but also an interaction between social actors or societies, whose relations are filtered
by their respective ‘imagining consciousnesses’. (Bayart 1995: 137)
Other scholars have likened the imaginary to the ways people conceptualise the possibilities
and realities of communities to which they belong (cf. Anderson 1983), or critiqued the use
of the imaginary as just another word for culture in an attempt to avoid the sticky over-
generalisations and homogeneity that ‘culture’ implies (Strauss 2006: 322). While the
imaginary has been deployed in anthropological thought as another term for culture, I am
more compelled by the depth of Bayart’s definition. The imaginary is first, a dimension that
interacts with the past, present, and projected future. This is especially valid for postcolonial
realities, as our prior discussion of time accentuates. Second, the imaginary is an interaction;
it cannot exist without the participation of something else. Third, the imaginary exists within
disjunctures (i.e. ‘heritage and innovation’), and once again disjunctures are especially
present in postcolonial realities.
De Boeck continues to avow that ‘the mediating qualities of the imaginary turn it into
an institutionalizing social force through which a society confronts and absorbs changes and
mutations, and thereby defines and authors itself anew’ (De Boeck 2001: 69). When
accessed, the imaginary presents a compelling avenue where the redefinition or shifting of
social realities as well as negotiation of identity is possible. The postcolonial imaginary is a
‘highly specific and locally created force’ that is able to reconfigure everyday life. This
reconfiguration ‘shapes the subjective, moral, and religious realities around the uses and
abuses of postcolonial power’ (Werbner 1996: 3).
Still, yet another side effect of the imposition of a linear, progressive paradigm of
time coincides with the conceptions of childhood discussed in chapter one: with this comes
the casting of children as agency-less and dependent beings not yet capable of interacting
within the capitalist world system. Euro-American international discourse, especially that of
humanitarian agencies, also tends to cast children as the ultimate embodiment of the future as

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well as the embodiment of suffering. Erica Bornstein, in her exploration of child sponsorship
programs with the international Christian humanitarian organisation World Vision in
Zimbabwe argues that African children in humanitarian discourse ‘are not only ambassadors
of hope...but they symbolize explosive moral terrain’ (Bornstein 2001: 601). When the
humanitarian organisation fails in a way that is noticeable, children then simultaneously
represent despair, the failed attempt at the carrot and hope for a better future. However,
aligning with more local notions of children and agency, children in postcolonial Africa are
often regarded ‘as social actors in the present, with a marked role and presence in the very
heart of the societal context. As such, children and youngsters appear as janus-like figures
and thereby embody a ‘frontier’ dynamics of mutation...’ (De Boeck 2005: 199).
The question remains as to how the imaginary is accessed and this is where
postcolonial children are specifically capable. Children, as highlighted in the previous
chapter, are inbetweeners. They are beings, they are becomings, and they find themselves at a
seemingly perpetual crossroads in, yet out, of social categories (Hess and Shandy 2008).
Perceiving children this way does not limit their agency, but rather bolsters it as ‘the onus of
agency is in both the present and future’ and agency is ‘informed by the past (in its habitual
aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities)
and toward the present’ (Uprichard 2008: 311, Uprichard 2008: 311 quoting Emirbayer and
Mische 1998: 963). Exploring child soldiers in Angola – a clear challenge to the casting of
children as agency-less innocents – Honwana defines children as ‘interstitial agents’ who are
only able to operate within their own logic, ‘the logic of the in-between’ (Honwana 2005:
32). She emphasizes that due to this ‘borderland condition’ and despite being deprived of a
direct locus of power, children ‘are able to navigate within a multiplicity of space and states
of being’ (Honwana 2005: 32). If we adopt Munn’s definition of agency, action as
meaningful and meaning-forming processes by which people produce both themselves and
their world, and recognise that children are ‘the human intersections where the ruptures and
fault lines of an African world in transition are manifested in both crisis and renewal’, it
becomes evident that given their unique temporality, children possess the unique agential
capacity of accessing the social imaginary to reshape, redefine, and negotiate not only
themselves but their wider social realities (Munn 1992: 106, De Boeck 2004: 155).
This argument is not intended to over celebrate the agency of children, or to deny the
ability of accessing the imaginary to adults. The imaginary is a social space, prevalent
especially in postcolonial African realities that can be accessed by anyone. However, I

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contend that children, even when constrained by local and global forces, are positioned to
access the imaginary and use it to bolster their agency specifically because of their own
particular temporality. As postcolonisation will never culminate in a utopian reconciliation of
unity, the reality must be an ‘ongoing practice of social construction that requires the
permanent cultivation of a postcolonial ethos of relation, which acknowledges and affirms
difference, positively conceived’ (Bignall 2010: 10). Children at the frontier of the imaginary
possess the agency to transform their realities and the realities of their local worlds by
standing guardian of this space through their constant siting at borders, crossroads, and
ruptures. In the next chapter, I will use distinct ethnographic examples to demonstrate how
children act as the sentinels of the imaginary and act as ongoing shifters and changers of
social realities even within the often oppressive nature of the postcolonial African state.

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Chapter 3: Accessing the imaginary
3.1 The ‘African state’: gerontocracy and the myth of the postcolony
Notwithstanding all of the use of the word ‘postcolonial’, this term itself is criticised.
Is the state of affairs in previously colonised countries truly post-colonial? Or, as Bignall
questions, is using the term ‘postcolonial’ simply an attempt to convey a false sense of
distance from the term ‘colonial’, which at times problematically suggests premature claims
to an already lived temporal and moral distance from the process of colonisation...’ (Bignall
2010: 4)? Mbembe describes the postcolony as ‘a plurality of ‘spheres’ and arenas, each
having its own separate logic yet nonetheless liable to be entangled with other logics when
operating in certain specific contexts (Mbembe 1992: 5). Werbner argues that the ‘post’ in
postcolonial is not simply resistance, but a myriad of relationships that must navigate a
tension between the commandement (the successor to colonial authority, see Mbembe 2001)
and the subjects. He posits that the ‘postcolonial is a postponement – at once a presence and
an absence’ (Werbner 1996: 4). This complexity of the post, but not post, postcolony that
exists but is also absent is reflective of the nature of postcolonial time discussed earlier. The
layers of the postcolony, due to its temporality, seep into one another creating a composite
reality with limited defined boundaries or certainties. The postcolony in actuality presents
itself in similar ways to the colony economically and politically via exploitation and
monopolisation of power. The distance from colony to postcolony is more compressed than
the ‘post’ conveys, contributing to the complexity of postcolonial realities. Within this space,
postcolonial subjects must deploy multiple identities - multiple identities that must be
constantly revised to face the shifting, fluid nature of postcolonial realities and the modern
African state (Mbembe 1992: 5).
The ‘African state’ is not a monolith, but it has been cast into particular categories and
‘characterized as ‘broken-backed’ and as an edifice floating above society and yet parasitic
on it’ (Wells 2015: kindle location 3833), once again reflective of the postcolonial temporal
disjunctures discussed previously. The ‘African state’ is often described as neopatrimonial
with no clear separation of powers, no clear monopoly on the means of violence, whilst the
Euro-American world (more specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank) has attempted to incentivize privatization of African markets in an attempt to liberalize
the economy and stimulate economic growth. However, the resulting corruption of this and
additional neoliberal policies simply recasts the African state as ‘simultaneously weak and

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coercive, deriving its right to rule not form the delegation of sovereignty by the people it
rules over, as it is supposed to according to liberal theory, but from a combination of violence
and rewards and the support of the international system’ (Wells 2015: kindle location 3833).
Wells (2015) further stresses that the neopatrimonial state can sustain itself if it can dispense
adequate economic rewards to the rising economic class: children and youth. However, once
the state fails to meet these obligations, it in turn increases labour needs and pressure on that
exact economic class, pressing deeper control onto at the local level, and subsequently fosters
resentment and discontent between the young and the old as the distribution of both economic
and political power is along clearly delineated generational lines (Bayart 1990, Argenti 1998,
Mbembe 2001).
In 1940, Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard published African Political Systems,
which sought to present a comparative study of different political structures in African
societies. Links to colonial authority aside, this volume underscores a reality of the power
structure in Africa that still persists in subtle, yet dynamic manifestations today. In the
preface, we encounter the term gerontocracy and its subsequent definition, rule by elders
(Radcliffe-Brown 1940: xxii). Political systems and the ways in which gerontocratic
structures divide power are not static, and the realities that they produce have shifted,
changed, and varied over time, but gerontocracy is still an active element in many African
societies today. This stands in marked contrast to what Lancy (2008) deems ‘neontocratic’
societies, such as the United States where children are valued above elders. Though this is an
oversimplification of a concept that is as diverse as Africa itself, children and youth in Africa
today still find ‘it difficult to accede to power as represented by the modern state, but [are]
also still marginalized in the gerontocracies that [control] so much of life…’ (Argenti 2002:
127). In the introduction, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes (1940) describe how economies in
Africa tended to exist as subsistence economies where rudimentary differentiations of labour
produced items necessary for survival which could be traded without the existence of capital.
They stress that it was the rise of capital that birthed permanent class divisions. These
divisions of class along generational and economic lines perpetuate restrictive barriers to
autonomy for children and youth.
In some instances, the gerontocratic nature of society is expressed via the acquisition
of power with age, however, it can also manifest in the inverse: acquiring wealth, rather than
biological age, draws the label of elder and positions one on top of a gerontocratic scheme
that, though not defined by the standard biological markers, still creates a powerful hierarchy

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(Argenti 2007). The gerontocratic nature of social structures in postcolonial Africa further
positions children into a seemingly restrictive, limited arena unless these children, like some
in Cameroon, acquire the wealth and therefore the status of elder. However, the promise of
education and economic development that both the colonial and postcolonial regimes
heralded often failed to exist in reality, leaving the young population in a stalemate: the
problems of the past persist in present without any hope of the future for those who are
supposed to be its embodiment. However, this is another temporal element – a generational,
age-based temporality that comingles with the fractured temporality of the postcolony that
uniquely positions children.
In exploring children and the street in urban African spaces, Tshikala Biaya (2005)
argues that two predominant methods that young people can harness to escape disjuncture
and their barriers to social autonomy to reaffirm identities are religious reconstructions and
through an assertion of a ‘syncinesic’ identity.4
This syncinesic identity is encapsulated by the
shifta (Biaya 2005) or the shege (De Boeck 2004) – the inbetweener. This identity ‘may be
assimilated with an artistic endeavour of self-creation.’ It manifests in ‘new forms of
sociability’ and constitutes a complete rupture with the dominant culture as well as with the
postcolonial subject (Biaya 2005: 222). Biaya continues to emphasize that ‘the dreamed
imaginary is indubitably at the heart of this process. The young person manages to
circumvent the moral codes imposed by the society or the religious authorities, either by
turning his back on them or by making them the objects of derision’ (Biaya 2005: 223).
Postcolonial derision, according to Mbembe (1992, 2001) is reflected by a link between
domination and the grotesque (Werbner 1996: 2) and underscores the vapidity of power in the
postcolony. Within this derision lies possibility: the possibility to distance the subject from
the object of derision (postcolonial pressures, gerontocratic pressures, etc.) where a
reclamation of self occurs via becoming a stranger, a ‘thing’ that exercises domination over
the forms that dominate it (Mbembe and Roitman 1995). In doing so, children through
activities such as masking performances and ownership of witchcraft accusations, rather than
blatantly confronting the structures of power that seemingly limit their agential capacities,
4
The rise in Pentecostal Christianity, born-again Christian movements, and a surge in Sufi Islam are some of the
ways that children and youth in postcolonial Africa reposition themselves against a gerontocratic background
and reaffirm their identities (Biaya 2005, Diouf 2003, Tranberg Hansen 2014). For example, Van Dijk (1992)
highlights how young born-again preachers in Malawi occupy a middle ground between tradition and modern
urbanity, thereby rejecting both the ‘traditional’ gerontocratic society where the elders rule and ‘modern’
postcolonial political space within which they are operating.

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actually ‘bridle, trick, and...toy with power’ in the postcolony (Mbembe 1992: 22, italics
original).
One other compelling example of this bridling of the power of gerontocracy and the
postcolony that hints at the capacity of children’s ability to access the imaginary to
restructure social hierarchies and redefine realities are the Tuareg music festivals in Niger. In
Niger, the Tuareg age groups are defined not by biological markers (further underscoring the
complicated nature of defining a ‘child’), but by social and ritual positions within society.
Most participants in the music festivals are socially cast as children or youth: unmarried
participants or married participants without children of their own. Within a community with
tense elder-children divides, as the elders tend to be stricter adherents to Islamic principles
whereas youth closer to traditional ritual behaviours, the music festivals provide children the
opportunity to ‘communicate covertly and circumvent elder’s official discourse of authority’
(Rasmussen 2001: 136). The performances of the tende (drum) and the anzad (one-stringed
bowed lute) provide a forum for individual agency and assertion of power for children in the
youth-elder conflicts, as elders do not dominate the festival spaces. Furthermore, Tuareg
elders believe that children possess no sin; thereby they are expected to act as political
mouthpieces in the ongoing Tuareg conflict against the Nigerien government as children will
not incur the same ramifications as their adult counterparts, reflecting both precolonial and
postcolonial values comingling (Rasmussen 2001). Through a subtle manipulation of the
oppressive power of both lasting gerontocracies and pervasive colonial inequalities, the
Tuareg children and youth at the festivals communicate with each other in covert manners
away from the eyes and ears of elders. Their ability to occupy the soapbox of politics without
repercussion underscores the explosive social capacity that children in unique generational
and temporal spaces can harness. Children are able to enter political space ‘as saboteurs; their
potential for political sabotage’ stemming from their ‘incomplete subjugation to contexts and
co-opters, and to their own power for action, response and subversion in contexts of political
definition’ (Durham 2000: 113).
While Rasmussen’s (2001) example highlights the ways that children in the
postcolony, dealing with pressure from elders and navigating dichotomies such as the modern
and traditional, trick, toy, and bridle with power within the social structures they have been
dealt, it does not explicitly highlight children’s ability to access the imaginary. Children in
Oku, Cameroon and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo use some of the same
subtle manoeuvres as Tuareg youth, but on a more radical scale by accessing the imaginary

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and reshaping social dynamics. Rasumussen’s (2001) work on the Tuareg provides the
foundation: ways in which children and youth navigate their immediate present’s to assert
agency. Argenti’s (1998, 2005, 2007) work on Oku children and De Boeck’s (2004, 2005)
work on witch children in Kinshasa illuminate the heart of children’s unique agential
capacities stemming from their particular temporality in the African postcolony and expose
children as sentinels of the imaginary.
3.2 The imaginary as a reclamation tool: overcoming violent past-presents-futures in
Cameroon
In the Oku chiefdom of the Cameroonian Grassfields political upheaval and violence
defined the past. Before independence, children and youth were the primary targets of the
slave trade and during the colonial regime they were frequently oppressed by forced labour
(Argenti 2007). Oku, in the Northwestern province of Cameroon has been a stronghold of the
main opposition party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF) during the transition to multi-party
democracy in 1992. As such, most children in Oku have seen parents or family members
beaten or killed as a result of political turmoil. As a consequence of this, children often
appropriate elements of militarization and politicization into their play (Argenti 1998, 2005,
2007).5
One of the methods children use to navigate this semi-violent present punctured
heavily by a violent past is by independently articulating masking performances known as
kesum-body (Argenti 1998). The kesum-body include dancing and music, but also incorporate
figures of political interest such as members of the SDF and the ‘white man’ to touch upon
pasts, presents, and uncertain futures that may evolve from realities inseparable from these
key players. Masquerades and masking performances are central to all Grassfield
Cameroonians, but due to a shift in practical and symbolic power from royal chiefdoms to the
national state and capital during the transition to multi-party democracy some of the adult
masking ceremonies have lost their symbolic power (Argenti 1998: 69, 2005, 2007).
Argenti stresses that during this shift, which is influenced by complex global and
neoliberal flows pressing upon the newly semi-democratic state, and because adult masking
5
Play is one of the ways that anthropologists have analysed children as it is both representative of a
quintessential element of childhood as well as a universal phenomenon (Lancy 2008). It is often regarded as the
way in which culture is passed from generation to generation and as a method of socialization (see Goldman and
Emmison 1995, Schwartzman 1976 for overviews of play in anthropology). However, play is also regarded as a
powerful creative space where children can reconfigure social realities that moves beyond simple mimetic
processes. (see for example ‘play’ as related to the liminal/liminoid and defined by Turner 1982).

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ceremonies hold close ties with royal lineages, children move into a space of increased
agency:
Faced with the need to represent and negotiate a modernist translocal world in political flux…
Child masquerades…are unrestricted by royal edicts controlling their form and performance
and are consequently free to change in response to their changing social and political world.
Unrestricted by concerns of tradition and authenticity, child masking brings the ‘places of the
gods’ [the liminal space of the forest where the spirits and ancestors reside within the
Grassfield Cameroonian cosmology] into juxtaposition with contemporary and party-political
exemplars. (Argenti 1998: 69)
In these masking ceremonies, children operate and participate freely and fluidly. Their
participation and leadership is transformative and non-hierarchical, often acephalous. This
contrasts the adult masking ceremonies that are constrained by proper membership achieved
through complex initiations (Argenti 1998). Furthermore, the costume of children differs
from the traditional masking costumes of adults. Whereas adult masking costumes are made
of raffia fibre and human hair or a blue-and-white cloth associated with the royal family,
children’s costumes are made of discarded items such as plastic coffee bags or found objects
such as aluminium siding or cardboard. Adult masks are always monochrome helmet masks
made of wood, allowing some of the face – though covered lightly – to be shown. Children’s
masks are made from found objects, decorated flamboyantly with chicken feathers, coloured
paper, and paint and completely cover the child’s features. The differences in costumes
underscores children’s harnessing of a new material world: that of modernity and imagined
wealth whereas the material used in adult masking ceremonies speaks specifically to a
traditional material culture of ‘nature’ and the wild (Argenti 1998: 81). The complete
covering of the face suggests the adoption of a distinctly new identity during the
performance, moving beyond the past, present, and future into a space where reconstruction
occurs: the imaginary.
Children in the Cameroonian Grassfields also embody a place pregnant with symbolic
power. As Alma Gottlieb (1998, 2004) highlights of Beng children in Cote d’Ivoire, Oku
children also occupy a transitional space between the afterworld (in the Cameroonian case,
the ‘place of the gods’) and the living world, emphasizing further their identity as
‘inbetweeners’. Children, unlike adults, are able to access both spaces as ghon mjin or
‘children of the gods’ (Argenti 1998: 79). Emphasizing their unique temporality, children’s
proximity to the ancestral world captures their ability to capitalize on the past and the future

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when adults cannot due to their distance from both. Thus, these dances and masking
performances of the children of the Grassfields ‘bear witness to the fractured temporality that
they embody, enabling them to keep watch over the silent, unspoken violence of their
predicament’ (Argenti 2007: 32). Not only do the children embody the fractures of the
Cameroonian postcolony, but also they keep watch over it; they guard the pain of the present
through their ability of overcoming it via the imaginary within masking performances. The
performances, and the differences in the dress between the children and the adults accentuate
how postcolonial African children are able to ‘live one world as a window on the other’ and
in the case of Oku, by ‘living a reality of violent oppression through a controllable and
equally lived performative embodiment of that violence in an attempt to gain mastery over it’
(Argenti 1998: 70).
If we return to Bayart’s definition of the imaginary as a space where a conversation
between the past, the present, and the future, mixed with political actions or motivations it is
evident that Oku children, through their masking performances navigate between the painful
history of slavery and colonialism as well as their historically punctuated present, adapt to a
dynamic and quickly shifting socio-political landscape. Children on the frontier or
borderlines of these temporal disjunctures ‘embody the sharpening contradictions of the
contemporary world in especially acute form’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 21). By
simultaneously mimicking and defying reality, these performances ‘afford children the ability
to create real social personas in response to a new political environment’ (Argenti 1998: 82).
As inbetweeners or shifters, these children have the ability of delving deeper into social
realities by accessing the imaginary through these performative actions and map deeper, more
revelatory meta narratives of society’s needs, desires, and underlying motivations (Durham
2000: 113). In harnessing their unique temporality as inbetweeners, children transcend the
fractured temporality of their postcolonial reality as these ‘commemorative ceremonies, as
quintessentially modernist practices inscribe historical events in chronological time order to
separate their participants from the past by means of an imagined unilineal forward
progression’ (Argenti 2007: 5). Thus, children are using one paradigm that contributes to
disjuncture, a linear time-framework, to shift time experience into a linear framework that
benefits them by allowing their transcendence of the past, but on their own terms. They
escape the past that haunts them in the present and therefore unburden themselves of the
expectations of the future as the past, that which is their responsibility to overcome in the
future, is left behind. Still, accessing the imaginary and reshaping social space is not always a

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gentle assertion of agency through a performance that has a clearly defined beginning and
end. In Kinshasa, the imaginary itself is laden with symbolic violence and is a reality on its
own.
3.3 The dark side of the imaginary: allegories of cannibalism and witchcraft in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo
What happens when the imaginary takes over, when the ‘double’ or the ‘iréel’
becomes indistinguishable from the immediate present? The Democratic Republic of the
Congo is a country that has been embroiled in a multitude of labyrinthine civil wars and
social conflicts, economic crises both pre- and post- independence, all whilst navigating
layers of robust identities. Children in the DRC, specifically children in the capital Kinshasa,
‘the quintessential postcolonial African city’, increasingly find themselves at the centre of
these serpentine social and political entanglements (De Boeck 2011: 264 quoting Pieterse
2010: 1). In Kinshasa, the double nature of African reality is almost tangible, always lurking
just beneath the surface of the visible reality (Mbembe 2001, De Boeck 2005). However,
Filip De Boeck argues that in contemporary urban Congo, ‘the societal crisis seems to have
embedded itself in the changing function and qualities of junction and disjunction’ where
there occurs a ‘new epistemological breach, which is basically appearing in what is a growing
indiscernibleness between the first and second world, or between reality and its double’ (De
Boeck 2005: 188-189). It is as if the current of seeping pasts into presents into futures occurs
with so much force that the imaginary is palpable and immediately accessible in Kinshasa.
Though the imaginary may be resting closer to the surface of reality for everyone, it does not
negate children’s unique capabilities of harnessing it, using it to shift their identities and
social structures.
A growing number of children in Kinshasa are living on the streets, and a powerful
contributing factor to this is accusations of witchcraft against children. De Boeck includes a
detailed and vivid personal account from one such fourteen year old child, Mamuya where
she describes becoming a witch because of her boyfriend and explains how she has to offer
him human meat, that she transforms into a cockroach, eats buttocks, has a grandmother who
is a witch, and how she has killed her baby brother (De Boeck 2005: 192). Similar stories
emerge from male and female children of all ages, and accusations of witchcraft stigmatise
the children forcing them to take to the streets. Some of the children occupying the street
were orphaned from conflict or the HIV/AIDS epidemic rather than excommunicated due to

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their sorcery, but often the accused are accused of witchcraft in relation to an actual event
such as the death of Mamuya’s little brother, who actually died. In reality, the nature of these
events may not be directly or singularly tied to witchcraft, but occur because of extreme
poverty and economic conditions, the health crisis, or varying other unfortunate social factors
that prevail within the postcolonial DRC. Nonetheless, witchcraft and the child witches who
inhabit a rather dark imaginary operate a de facto presence in Kinshasa.
This darker side of the imaginary still presents children with a particular opportunity
to reshape social realities as ‘becoming a witch is certainly a way to attain...independence, to
challenge parents, public authority and the established order, and to inscribe oneself into a
specific temporality: the timeframe of the moment’ (De Boeck 2005: 202). In Congo, the
social crisis is a crisis of seeking explanations, reasons why the fractured reality of everyday
life often littered with hardship seems never ending, and children subsequently become the
scapegoats. For example, as economic burdens to a family, sending a child into the street as
an accusation of witchcraft may free the family from certain economic constraints. However,
when the children find themselves in the streets they join stables/écuires or hierarchical
ranked familial units of other children (De Boeck 2004, 2005). These groups are ordered by
age, and the members partake in activities such as theft, prostitution, and imbibing of illegal
substances to achieve dédoublement also known as stepping outside of oneself (De Boeck
2004). On the street and through their cannibalistic witchcraft activity, these children
establish their own society, a ‘society at the border of the city of the living: close to the
roundabouts and markets, but also in the withdrawal of cemeteries, sharing the space of the
dead’ (Melice 2007: 20, translation my own).
In this double world, the world occupied by the witch personalities of the children of
the street, children have their own children, their own families, travel to Europe and America,
and construct their own social systems (Melice 2007, De Boeck 2004, 2005). When they
accuse others of witchcraft, children or adults, their words come with severe and actual
consequence rather than falling upon deaf ears. Regardless of whether it is only symbolic, the
nocturnal consumption of their elders removes the barriers to a direct route to ‘modernity’s
spaces of consumption’ (De Boeck 2005: 200). These ‘allegories of cannibalism’ evoke ‘not
only the unfettered appetites unleashed by modern capitalism, but the devastating effects of
the free market economy on the social fabric of Africa’s imploding cities’ (Argenti 200: 143).
De Boeck emphasizes that the imaginary is what operates the disjunction between the real
and its double, between the world of the living and the children’s world of witches (De Boeck

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2005). In this parallel world, created through children’s access to the imaginary and the
overpowering nature of the Congolese double, children problem solve. It is not just mere
fantasy, but the imagination behind this parallel world accessed by children’s proximity to the
social imaginary is ‘an organized field of social practices, a form of work...and a form of
negotiation between sites of agency...and globally defined fields of possibility’ (Appadurai
1990: 5). Living within the imaginary full time, ‘the cultural politics of identity’ plays upon
the tension between the disjunctures in postcolonial Congolese society and the desires for
answers. What’s more, ‘it also reaffirms authority...by counteracting the traces of colonial
and precolonial sociality within the postcolonial’ (Werbner 1996:4).
In De Boeck’s account of Kinshasa, child witches and children on the street represent
the symbolic breakdown of the entire Congolese society much in the same manner that
globally children are burdened with the weight of existing as the symbolic representations of
the future of humanity. However, in Kinshasa, these children, whilst representing the
breakdown of society, act as social phoenixes. They transform the structures within society
that constrict them such as the witchcraft accusations by owning them, the gerontocratic
impositions by redefining notions of kinship through stables, and the economic pressures
through creating a separate theft-based, trade economy. They are clear agents of culture,
makers of society that ‘contribute to the structures, norms, rituals, and directions of society
while also being shaped by them’ (De Boeck and Honwana 2005: 3).
In both Cameroon and Kinshasa, children remind us of their unique temporality that is
heightened by the experience of ruptured time in the postcolony. In Cameroon, the children
stand sentinel not only on the border between the imaginary and their reality, advocating for a
unilineal time that advantages them, but also as close guards to the gates of the ancestors: the
past and their future. As these layers of time are closer to them, they are uniquely positioned
and particularly able to access them. In Kinshasa, where the temporal experience is highly
complicated and almost overwhelming, children use their status as inbetweeners to navigate
from past to present to future through double worlds where they are both dead and alive, past
and present whilst also capitalizing on the imaginary that seeped so deeply into their reality.
In both cases, children’s unique temporality is essential to their agential production.

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Conclusions
In summary, children as agents rather than objects of culture are central elements to
anthropology. They are central to the reshaping of present and future societies, the navigation
and reconnecting of the temporal disjunctures and socio-economic difficulties of postcolonial
African states, and therefore informants to whom we should pay closer attention. Children
were present in historical anthropological manuscripts as well as within colonial and pre-
colonial writings about engagements with ‘other’ societies, but featured frequently as objects
without any significant contribution to society or the ways in which we should understand
societies. Tied closely to trends in developmental psychology, studies on children focused
primarily on how parents raised children, on how parents viewed children, and questions
regarding childhood sexuality without close attention paid to the actual thoughts, wishes, and
personal identifications of the children themselves. With the advent of feminist anthropology
as well as critiques of ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986), children began to be
featured more prominently in anthropological discourse as subjects and interlocutors in their
own right during the 20th
century. Nonetheless, children and especially children in
postcolonial Africa are still scantily represented within child-focused ethnographies without
direct ties to how this affects what children become – adults – rather than what they are as
actors in an immediate present.
Yet, children exist as actors in an immediate present despite the pervasive Euro-
American tendency to define them otherwise. Children in postcolonial Africa present
themselves as social actors and agents of culture rather than passive, agency-less dependent
beings contributing minimally to society. This agential capacity of postcolonial African
children is produced through the complex interweavings of social, experienced time in the
postcolony, which is experienced or represented as blurred, disjointed, and tangled, as
compared to the strictly linear, progressive, punctuated time of the capitalist agenda which is
imposed upon it. Children’s proximity to both the past and future, their unique temporality as
inbetweeners (Carsten 1991) and beings and becomings (Uprichard 2008), and the time in the
postcolony as well as the disjointed economies of the often neopatrimonial and postcolonial
‘African state’ offer a particular social landscape from which a powerful social space
emerges: the social imaginaire (Bayart 1990). As children exist as ‘interstitial agents’
(Honwana 2005) and on the borderlands and frontiers of change and renewal in society (De
Boeck 2005), and because of their unique temporality and position within the relatively
fractured postcolony, children as sentinels of the imaginary are able to access the it and