‘That rebellious youth’ alarmed colonial authorities and elders alike is increasingly an issue for historians. This article surveys the issue as an introduction to the two studies that follow. It considers both the creation of images of youthful defiance as part of a debate about youth conducted largely by their seniors and the real predicaments faced by young people themselves. Concern revolved around the meanings of maturity in a changing world where models of responsible male and female adulthood, gendered expectations and future prospects were all in flux. Surviving the present and facing the future made elders anxious and divided as well as united the young. The article concludes by suggesting a number of areas, including leisure and politics, where the voice of youth might be more clearly heard, and proposes comparisons – with the past, between racial groups and between ‘town’ and ‘country’ – that link the varied experiences of the young.

Rebellious youth in Colonial Africa

Introduction: police, labour and colonial violence Part I. Ideas and Practices: 1. Colonial policing: a discursive framework 2. 'What did you do in the colonial police force, daddy?' Policing inter-war dissent 3. 'Paying the butcher's bill': policing British colonial protest after 1918 Part II. Colonial Case Studies: French, British and Belgian: 4. Gendarmes: work and policing in French North Africa after 1918 5. Policing Tunisia: mineworkers, fellahs and nationalist protest 6. Rubber, coolies and communists: policing disorder in French Vietnam 7. Stuck together? Rubber production, labour regulation and policing in Malaya 8. Caning the workers? Policing and violence in Jamaica's sugar industry 9. Oil and order: repressive violence in Trinidad's oilfields 10. Profits, privatization and police: the birth of Sierra Leone's diamond industry 11. Policing and politics in Nigeria: the political economy of indirect rule, 1929-39 12. Depression and revolt: policing the Belgian Congo Conclusion Notes to the text.

Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style, Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

This essay discusses British discourses and efforts to regulate social policy in both urban and rural areas in late colonial Tanzania. It focuses mainly on questions of social security and especially on the vague concept of social welfare and development, which after the Second World War became a favoured means of expressing a new imperial commitment to colonial people. The British were very reluctant about implementing international standards of social security in Tanganyika, mainly due to the insight that the cost of providing European-scale benefits could not be borne by the colonial regime in such a poor territory. They were far more enthusiastic in pursuing a policy of social development, embodied in social welfare centres and various other schemes. It is argued that in Tanzania, this policy remained focused on peasantization rather than on proletarianization and was characterized by a disconnection between Colonial Office mandarins in London, attempting to create bourgeois, respectable African middle classes, and colonial officials in Tanganyika, seeking to maintain the political legitimacy of the chiefs and headmen. Most Africans ignored rather than challenged many of these state efforts. However, the nationalist party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under Julius Nyerere believed in these programmes and continued such dirigiste and poorly financed improvement schemes after independence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853704009880

Regulating the social: social security, social welfare and the state in late colonial tanzania

This article examines the role of male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam. 'Youth', as a category of opposition to elders, became important during the inter-war period as it was inhabited by educated African bureaucrats aspiring to representation in urban politics over the traditional claims of authority by local ethnic Zaramo and Shomvi elders. This group of bureaucrats grew in power through the popularization of racial-nationalist politics, and in the 1950s formed the Tanganyika African Nationalist Party (TANU), which instituted its own category of 'youth' with the creation of the TANU Youth League (TYL). Consisting mainly of young, under-employed men who failed to obtain sufficient educational qualifications, the Youth League challenged the late colonial state's theoretical monopoly over violence through voluntary and aggressive policing activities. After the work of independence was complete, there was practical way to demobilize this enormous, semi-autonomous police and intelligence-gathering force. The repeated reassertion of party control over its Youth League took many forms in the decade after independence - through the creation of a National Service and the militarization of development; frequent nationalist events and rituals where Youth Leaguemembers controlled public space; and a war on urban morality led by Youth League shock troops. Control over youth also offered a potentially autonomous patrimony for ambitious TANU partymembers. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of the general failure of both state and party to generate sufficient resources to serve as a patron to patron-seeking youth, which has effectively decentralized youth violence and vigilantism ever since. A political history of 'youth', both as a social category and political institution, can shed further light on contemporary dilemmas of youth violence, meanings of citizenship, and hidden motors of party politics. 
Cet article examine le role de la jeunesse masculine dans l'histoire politique de
Dar es Salaam. La «jeunesse», en tant que categorie d'opposition aux anciens,
a pris son importance pendant la periode d'entre deux guerres, au cours de
laquelle des bureaucrates africains instruits aspiraient a etre representes dans la
politique urbaine face aux revendications d'autorite traditionnelles exerces par
les anciens locaux des ethnies Zaramo et Shomvi. Ce groupe de bureaucrates a
gagne en pouvoir a travers la popularisation d'une politique raciale nationaliste,
et forma dans les annees 1950 un nouveau parti baptise Tanganyika African
Nationalist Union (TANU), qui instituait sa propre categorie de «jeunes»
avec la creation d'une ligue de la jeunesse, la TANU Youth League (TYL).
Cette ligue de la jeunesse, constituee essentiellement d'hommes jeunes sousemploy
es sans qualifications suffisantes, remettait en cause le monopole
theorique de l'ancien Etat colonial sur la violence a travers des activites de
police volontaires et agressives. Une fois l'action d'independance achevee,
les moyens pratiques de demobiliser cette enorme police semi-autonome et
force de renseignements etaient limites. La reaffirmation repetee du controle
du parti sur la TYL a pris diverses formes au cours de la decennie qui
a suivi l'independance: creation d'un Service national et militarisation du
developpement, manifestations nationalistes frequentes et rituels dans lesquels
les membres de la TYL controlaient l'espace public, guerre sur le theme de
la moralite urbaine menee par des troupes de choc de la TYL. Le contr ole
exerce sur ces jeunes offrait par ailleurs aux membres ambitieux de la TANU
un patrimoine potentiellement autonome. Les annees 1970 ont vu le debut
de l'incapacite generale, tant de la part de l' Etat que du parti, a generer des
ressources suffisantes pour servir de patrons aux jeunes en quete de patron, ce
qui a eu pour effet de decentraliser la violence des jeunes et le vigilantisme. Une
histoire politique de la «jeunesse», en tant que categorie sociale et institution
politique, peut nous eclairer sur les dilemmes contemporains que sont la
violence des jeunes, les significations de la citoyennete et lesmoteurs caches de
la politique des partis.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40027110.pdf

Youth, the TANU Youth League and Managed Vigilantism in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 1925-73

The British Institute in Eastern Africa ABSTRACT: During the British colonial period a substantial young African population emerged in Dar es Salaam. Both colonial officials and African elders viewed this with dismay. They felt the resulting demoralisation of African youth posed a threat to both (African) authority and (colonial) order. However, measures aimed at addressing the ramifications of this phenomenon were mostly unsuccess- ful. Ironically, whilst British colonial policy aimed to keep African youth quiescent in rural, gerontocratic, tribal administrations, colonialism in fact provided the context in which both rapid urbanization and generational tension occurred. These continued to occur after independence; and it is argued that TANU politicians not only inherited the problems associated with the adminis- tration of the Tanganyikan capital, but that their responses were influenced by European and 'elite' African attitudes of the colonial era. THE presence of large numbers of poor and often parentless juveniles scraping a precarious existence on the 'mean streets' of African towns and cities has become an increasingly familiar phenomenon in post-colonial Africa.' By 1995, it was estimated that there were as many as five million so- called street children in the region.2 African towns have also, since in- dependence, experienced a substantial increase in the numbers of African youth, among whom unemployment is widespread. The official reaction to these groups has been to consider them a problem; a view shared by municipal officials, the police and politicians alike. Negative perceptions of youths as threatening civil order have often resulted in their harsh treatment, with forcible removal from towns a frequent response3 and their harassment by municipal authorities common practice.4

Urchins, loafers and the cult of the cowboy: urbanization and delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919-61.

This article examines the historical origins of one of urban Africa’s most visible contemporary problems, using Tanzania as a case study. The middle decades of the twentieth century are identified as a time when a pivotal shift occurred as labour scarcity gave way to over-supply, resulting in the emergence of enduring ‘structural’ unemployment. This was influenced by a combination of phenomena arising from the deepening impact of colonialism: including demographic growth leading to an increasingly youthful population, commoditisation and heightened African expectations influenced by socio-cultural and ideological factors. These were compounded by a shift in late-colonial labour policy towards stabilisation, which had the unintended effect of stymieing job creation. The latter part of the article describes the panicked response of the incoming African regime, faced with what they initially interpreted as a potentially insurrectionary class of urban unemployed. Closing remarks speculate on whether, in the longue duree , one may interpret unemployment in a more positive light as part of an ongoing wider historical transformation.

Andrew Burton

Papers

Urchins, loafers and the cult of the cowboy: urbanization and delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919-61.

Raw youth, school-leavers and the emergence of structural unemployment in late-colonial urban tanganyika