Building Nations, Making Youth: Institutional Choice, Nation-State Building and the Politics of Youth Activism in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania
Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation explains why, while societies in both postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania were undergoing similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures during the initial decades of independence (1961-1989), university students’ responses to these changes strikingly diverged across these two cases. Eschewing explanations of youth activism that prioritize socioeconomic or demographic variables, this study opts for a historical institutional explanation, situating these divergent trajectories of student activism within broader histories of postcolonial nation-state formation. My analysis reveals that the different institutional choices and arrangements, which undergirded Kenya and Tanzania’s respective nation-state building strategies, harnessed and channeled the energies of young people (i.e. university students) into systems of power in significantly different manners, legitimating and de-legitimating certain forms of political participation and violence among youth in the decades following independence, with lasting implications. The first part of this study explores the historical origins of divergent strategies of nation-state building in Kenya and Tanzania, explaining institutional origins primarily in relation to societal constraints that confronted these new African regimes on the ground at independence. Here I argue that distinctive colonial political economies and institutional architectures produced different spaces of possibility for these countries’ respective postcolonial nation-state building projects. Part II examines how these distinctly configured states opted to incorporate the university and its students into their nation-state building projects differently. In Kenya, the relationship between the state and university students was marked by the ruling party’s unwillingness to institutionalize party control over the university throughout the 1960s and 1970s, enabling university students to organize and operate politically on campus beyond the realm of state or party control. As a result, when students became increasingly discouraged by the authoritarian political direction of the ruling party during the 1980s, levels of protest, unity and anti-regime sentiment within this group reached their height. In Tanzania, the TANU state utilized a different set of co-optative institutional implements in managing their university students. As a result of these institutional strategies, the Tanzanian state was better prepared to manage and limit overt student dissert during the decade of the 1980s, because the state had effectively usurped university students’ organizational autonomy.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Luke Melchiorre
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3150038722