Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Outcast Majority
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1959
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-sommers-862a9030/ * https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/marc-sommers * https://www.bu.edu/today/2016/outcast-majority-marc-sommers/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
no 98112604
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/no98112604
HEADING:
Sommers, Marc
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__ |a Anthropology |a History |2 lcsh
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__ |a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars |a Boston University. African Studies Center |a University of Michigan |a Boston University |2 naf
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__ |a The mending of hearts, c1996: |b t.p. (Marc Sommers)
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__ |a The outcast majority, 2015: |b ECIP title page (Marc Sommers) ECIP data view (Sommers, Marc, b. 1959) ECIP galley (a Wilson Center fellow)
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__ |a Wilson Center home page, May 26, 2015 |b (Marc Sommers, fellow, Africa program, Sep 06, 2011 – May 25, 2012; Visiting Researcher, African Studies Center, Boston University; Consultant; B.A. (with Distinction) History, University of Michigan, 1981; M.A. Anthropology, Boston University, 1990; Ph.D. Anthropology, Boston University, 1994)
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PERSONAL
Born in 1959.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A., 1981; Boston University, M.A., 1990; Boston University, Ph.D., 1994.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Boston University, Boston, MA, visiting researcher at the African Studies Center, 1995-; Women’s Refugee Commission, New York, NY, technical adviser, child and adolescent issues, 1997-99; Care USA, Washington, DC, senior technical adviser for Youth at Risk, 2005; Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Medford, MA, associate research professor, 2005-11; Education Development Center, Washington, DC, senior technical adviser, 2014-15; U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, senior adviser, analyst and evaluator, also a youth, development, and gender expert, 2015-.
Columbia Group for Children in Adversity, senior associate, 2010-.
AWARDS:Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow, United States Institute of Peace, 2009-10; Africa Program Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011-12.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Marc Sommers is a senior adviser and expert on youth, development, gender at the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations in the U.S. Department of State. Since 1995, he has also been a visiting researcher at the African Studies Center at Boston University. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the United States Institute of Peace. Sommers holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Boston University and earned his B.A. at the University of Michigan. He has published several books on youth refugees in post-civil-unrest Africa countries and also a study on rebuilding the education system in Kosovo.
Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania, published in 2001, focuses on six young Burundi men who had fled genocide and then escaped from refugee camps in central Tanzania in order to work illegally in the fast-growing capital city, Dar es Salaam. The men gather in “Bongoland,” or Brainland, where through their Pentecostal faith they form patron-client relationships central to Burundian society. Sommers follows the men through their experiences, including life in the refugee camps, their encounters with Tanzanian authorities, and their adjustment to Tanzanian policies regarding immigrants.
The text also includes church hymns, photographs, and cartoons, through which Sommers tries to give a sense of the men’s lives, including aspects of city life and the street smarts that have helped the men survive, as well as broader references to African youth culture, Hutu ethnic culture, and the contemporary African experience. Writing in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Jerome Lewis commented on Sommers’s findings: “The results [of Sommers’s study] provide important qualitative data on the situation of an estimated three-quarters of all African refugees, who are self-settled rather than inhabitants of UNHCR refugee camps.”
In 2012, Sommers published Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood. This study focuses on the Central African nation of Rwanda and its success story of recovery after devastating genocide during the 1990s. Sommers follows young Rwandans who are “stuck” in urban desperation while dealing with a government that still practices oppressive policies. In Rwandan culture, a man must build a house before he can marry, but the country’s severe housing crisis and limited economic opportunities mean that young men and women are putting off marriage and settling down. Some are moving to the capital city, Kigali, where they face a greatly increased risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.
Sommers interviewed Rwandans between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five for the book, which also discusses Rwandan govenmental policies designed to control a young and poor population in a densely packed, urbanized country. Finding Sommers’s approach somewhat limited, Susan Thomson remarked in African Studies Review: “Stuck lacks a clear theoretical framework. Instead, the author works through the concepts of failed masculinity, rapid urbanization, and strong government without sufficiently explaining why he chose this approach for analyzing his interview material.”
For The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa, published in 2015, Sommers again eschewed theory in preference of his own fieldwork, which consisted of interviews with hundreds of African youth. In an interview at BU Today, Sommers reflected on his frustration with existing theoretical frameworks for understanding African youth: “What I found countered the notion that if you have so many young people and not enough jobs, you’ll have unrest. The evidence doesn’t back that up. The demographics known as the ‘youth bulge’ across Africa and most of the Middle East would cause instability just about everywhere, if it were true. But that isn’t happening. In Africa most civil wars are over…. But if we take a careful look, what we see instead is the question, why are most youths so peaceful? The book uses that as a starting point: here’s what really is going on.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Africa, May 2013, Lyndsay Mclean Hilker, review of Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood, p. 352.
African Affairs, October, 2013, An Ansoms, review of Stuck, p. 685.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, J.M. Rich, review of The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa, p. 1549.
Comparative Education Review, November, 2013, Beth Lewis Samuelson, review of Stuck, p. 749.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March, 2005, Jerome Lewis, review of Fear in Bongoland, p. 183.
Reference & Research Book News, April 2012, review of Stuck.
ONLINE
African Studies Review, https://muse.jhu.edu/ (April 2013), Susan Thomson, review of Stuck.
BU Today (Boston University publication), https://www.bu.edu/today/ (July 21, 2016), “Challenging Assumptions about Africa’s Exploding Youth Population,” interview with author and brief review of The Outcast Majority.
H-Africa, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org (December 1, 2001), Inge Brinkman, review of Fear in Bongoland.
Wilson Center Web site, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/ (May 22, 2017), profile of Marc Sommers.
FORMER FELLOW AFRICA PROGRAM
Marc Sommers
EXPERTISE
Education Gender Africa
AFFILIATION
Visiting Researcher, African Studies Center, Boston University; Consultant
WILSON CENTER PROJECTS
“Youth and Conflict in Africa: Towards a New Policy Approach”
TERM
Sep 06, 2011 — May 25, 2012
Bio
Affiliated with the African Studies Center at Boston University, Marc Sommers is an internationally recognized expert on youth concerns in war and post-war countries. After serving as the headmaster of a girls’ school in Kenya and directing a Red Cross-sponsored community health program in New York, Marc earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Boston University, choosing as his dissertation topic the plight of Burundi refugee youth who were hiding illegally in urban Tanzania.
In his career as an academic and practitioner, Sommers’ research continues to focus on African youth. He has taught at The Fletcher School, Tufts University and consulted for a wide array of agencies and institutes, carrying out assessment and evaluation work that largely focused on gender, education, child soldier, conflict negotiation, urbanization and coordination issues, in addition to youth.
His many publications include Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania (Berghahn Books, 2001), which won the 2003 Margaret Mead Award, and Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (University of Georgia Press, 2012).
His research at the Woodrow Wilson Center contrasts the priorities of youth in war and post-war Africa with government and international agency responses to youth challenges.
Education
B.A. (with Distinction) History, University of Michigan, 1981; M.A. Anthropology, Boston University, 1990; Ph.D. Anthropology, Boston University, 1994
Project Summary
I will address the security, governance and development dimensions of one of today's most pressing policy challenges: what to do about massive youth populations in war-affected Africa. To consider this challenge, I will draw from extensive field interviews with youth in fifteen war-affected nations in Africa, interview senior policy experts, review policy and scholarly literature on war-affected youth and integrate findings from an anticipated Wilson Center conference on youth and conflict in Africa. Analysis will include testing two main hypotheses: (1) Despite the fact that virtually all conflict-affected African nations have overwhelmingly youthful populations, governments and their international partners often implement policies that are not youth-centered; and (2) Some of these policies unintentionally make matters worse for many war-affected youth and, by extension, for the pursuit of effective governance and long-term stability. Youth exclusion and policy constraints on governments promise to figure prominently in the analysis. The final form of this project will be a book manuscript that concludes with recommendations for effective support for Africa's war-affected youth.
Major Publications
Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (University of Georgia Press, in association with U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2011)
"Creating Programs for Africa's Urban Youth: The Challenge of Marginalization" (Journal of International Cooperation in Education 10(1), 2007)
Islands of Education: Schooling, Civil War, and the Southern Sudanese (1983-2004) (International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, 2005)
Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania (Berghahn Books, 2001)
Marley's War: Terror and Transformation in Sierra Leone (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, forthcoming).
- See more at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/marc-sommers#sthash.fdJE5n8t.dpuf
Book Launch: "The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa"
On January 14, 2016, the Wilson Center Africa Program hosted youth expert and former Wilson Center Fellow Dr. Marc Sommers, Visiting Researcher, Boston University, for the launch of his book The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa. Dr. Sommers was joined by Mr. Mark Hannafin, Executive Secretary and Senior National Security Adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and co-chair of the new USAID policy on youth in development.
In this session, Dr. Sommers discussed the isolated and disenfranchised role of the majority of youth in conflict and post-conflict societies and the implications for international development policy. The sheer number and proportion of youth in many countries has risen steeply; yet most are overlooked both by their home country and international aid programs. As a result, these outcast youth are denied opportunities for advancement, both economically and culturally. War and conflict exacerbate this issue, fracturing the development process of youth and deepening the chasm between youth and adulthood as a social construct.
In evaluating development policy, Dr. Sommers found that there is a problematic discrepancy between donor priorities and the reality on the ground in these conflict-affected societies. There has been a trend in development policy towards technocratic strategies and projects with measurable, verifiable outputs. Yet these approaches often fail to incorporate key variables such as elite structures, the nature of governance, local culture, and the target audience. There is an additional element of risk aversion, as donors — cognizant of their need to demonstrate success — are often hesitant to invest in segments of the youth population that are perceived as more “troubled.” An unintended consequence is the inclusion of primarily elite youth in most donor programming, to the exclusion of the majority of the youth population. Likewise, programming on youth primarily focuses on male youth, rendering the challenges of young women largely invisible.
In order to combat this systemic and cultural exclusion and improve the implementation of aid programs, we must first re-assess youth lives, including their own priorities and the factors that promote their cultural exclusion, and promote trust-based, qualitative research and strategic targeting. As the youth population in Africa continues to expand and countries are faced with conflict, it is imperative that the gap between excluded youth majorities and development strategies be addressed.
The Outcast Majority: War, Development and Youth in Africa can be found on Amazon.com
- See more at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/book-launch-the-outcast-majority-war-development-and-youth-africa#sthash.N3JAYPCn.dpuf
4/12/17, 11(30 PM
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Print Marked Items
Sommers, Marc. The outcast majority: war, development, and youth in Africa
J.M. Rich
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1549. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rich, J.M. "Sommers, Marc. The outcast majority: war, development, and youth in Africa." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1549. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454943019&it=r&asid=b5abd3cd10c9f90fe83a192a1b007bb9 Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454943019
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Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood
Beth Lewis Samuelson
Comparative Education Review.
57.4 (Nov. 2013): p749. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Samuelson, Beth Lewis. "Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood." Comparative Education Review,
Nov. 2013, p. 749+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA348228589&it=r&asid=6e542b5da09e7300c0b9f64c560234b2. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A348228589
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Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood
An Ansoms
African Affairs.
112.449 (Oct. 2013): p685. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ansoms, An. "Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood." African Affairs, vol. 112, no. 449, 2013, p.
685+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA372868980&it=r&asid=32131e8b8c99498f88099b1186f60c69. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A372868980
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Marc Sommers, Stuck: Rwandan youth and the struggle for adulthood
Lyndsay Mclean Hilker
Africa.
83.2 (May 2013): p352. From Book Review Index Plus. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0001972013000156 COPYRIGHT 2013 Cambridge University Press http://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/journal.html
Full Text:
MARC SOMMERS, Stuck: Rwandan youth and the struggle for adulthood. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press (hb $69.95 978 0 82033 890 3). 2012, 288 pp.
This ethnography of Rwandan youth is a valuable addition to the literature on both African youth and contemporary Rwanda, and will be of interest to social scientists interested in youth, gender relations, rural development, 'post- conflict' transformation and governance. The book is a little repetitive in places, but is written in an accessible, engaging style, mixing ethnographic detail and stories with analysis and reflection.
Sommers portrays the harsh lived realities of Rwandan young men and (to a lesser extent) young women who are literally 'stuck' between childhood and adulthood-unable to meet the exacting socio-cultural requirements to achieve adult status. This phenomenon of 'waithood'--d the pressures and risks it entails--is depressingly familiar, but Sommers details its specific manifestations in the Rwandan context. In rural Rwanda, the first step towards socially acceptable manhood is for young men to build a house. Only then can they formally marry, have children and achieve recognition as adult men. Currently, however, there is a severe housing crisis with a shortage of land, strict government regulations on where and how new houses can be built, and prohibitive price list for building material-especially roofing. Many young men interviewed had been working for years to purchase roof tiles one by one, and literally measured progress towards manhood in terms of tiles accumulated. Several had dropped out of school early to start on this long treadmill, although aware that they may never complete their houses.
Sommers also analyses the consequences of this failed masculinity for young women, offering insights into the realities of gender relations beneath Rwanda's positive reputation for progress on gender equality. The inability of young men to complete a house leads to marriage delays and also leaves young women 'stuck'. Instead of achieving recognition as women through legal marriage and childbearing, young women face increased risks of informal marriage, transactional sex, bearing 'illegitimate' children and being labelled as 'old ladies' if unmarried by their mid- twenties. In response to prospects of failed adulthood and public humiliation, some youth migrate, mostly to the capital Kigali. Here, most fail to secure a stable life, facing new problems of severe un--and under-employment, hunger and social isolation. Sommers reveals that many poor urban youth face a daily struggle for survival and many young women work as prostitutes and are fatalistic about contracting HIV/AIDS.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the language used by youth to describe their situation. Sommers uncovers a vocabulary of oppositions between youth who are 'up' (or 'above') and those who are 'down' (or 'below') that literally maps onto the geographical, social and economic realities of their lives. Those who live 'above' on the tops of the hills close to the roads are more educated, wealthier, better-informed and able to access opportunities. Those who live 'below' in the remote valleys are 'ignorant', poor and have no opportunities, facing a daily life of 'digging' and distressingly low expectations. Nonetheless, their remoteness permits a kind of quiet resistance to what the government wants them to do-join associations, attend meetings and engage in unpaid communal work.
Another strength of the book is its careful but incisive analysis of Rwanda's particular style of governance and how this compounds the entrapment of poor youth. Sommers describes the ambitious 'high modernism' of the political elite
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and its policy of 'centralized decentralization', which entails high levels of social control and regulation of daily life (even bodies). In this vertical system, the lowest-level officials feel unable to communicate the desperate realities of the majority of youth to their superiors, as they do not align with government policy objectives. Instead, high-level officials largely view young people as non-collaborative and unproductive, and therefore in need of guidance and direction. Sommers shows, however, that current youth policies that encourage (often compel) youth to join associations are misguided. They fail to address structural problems-such as the housing crisis and social norms around masculinity-and take little account of actual priorities voiced by youth.
Sommers's description of the challenges of conducting and (especially) reporting the results of research in Rwanda will be familiar to many. At the outset, he received considerable support and interest from government officials. But when his findings appeared to contradict government policy, there were attempts to discredit and dismiss them. Sommers points to the self-censorship that is common amongst both Rwandans and outsiders who wish to work or research in Rwanda. He is candid about his own struggle to counter tendencies towards 'filtering' his results, language and tone.
In his conclusion, Sommers poses the key question about similarities and differences between pre--and post-genocide Rwanda, given the high levels of youth participation in the 1994 genocide. He is cautious to question assumptions about links between youth exclusion and violence, and stresses that the easing of restrictions on rural-urban migration has provided one outlet for frustrated rural youth. He concludes, however, that there are worrying similarities with pre- genocide Rwanda-including the controlling style of governance and the entrapment and voicelessness experienced by the majority of youth. Overall, the book expresses a pessimism about the future of Rwanda that many scholars share.
LYNDSAY MCLEAN HILKER University of Sussex L.C.McLean-Hilker@sussex.ac.uk doi: 10.1017/S0001972013000156 Hilker, Lyndsay Mclean
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hilker, Lyndsay Mclean. "Marc Sommers, Stuck: Rwandan youth and the struggle for adulthood." Africa, vol. 83, no.
2, 2013, p. 352+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA333331794&it=r&asid=e0843880ec7582d3cb5733f94dfc127f. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A333331794
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Stuck; Rwandan youth and the struggle for adulthood
Reference & Research Book News.
27.2 (Apr. 2012): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780820338910
Stuck; Rwandan youth and the struggle for adulthood. Sommers, Marc.
U. of Georgia Press
2012
281 pages
$22.95
Paperback
Studies in security and international affairs
HQ799
Coming of age in a traditional way in Rwanda is hindered by young males' inability to build a house and then marry-- and the consequences of this stifled ambition are devastating. This book is published in association with the United States Institute of Peace, where Sommers was affiliated in 2009-10; he's currently a visiting researcher with Boston University's African Studies Center. He draws on interviews with young people, adults, and government officials to delineate various facets of social, cultural, and economic life, and the threat to security of current conditions.
([c]2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stuck; Rwandan youth and the struggle for adulthood." Reference & Research Book News, Apr. 2012. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA284980453&it=r&asid=155574ab527a64ae61bb70428523ef9b. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A284980453
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Fear in Bongoland: Burundi refugees in urban Tanzania
Jerome Lewis
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 11.1 (Mar. 2005): p183. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. http:/www.therai.org.uk/pubs/jrai/jrai.html
Full Text:
SOMMERS, MARC. Fear in Bongoland: Burundi refugees in urban Tanzania. xviii, 219 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. [pounds sterling]15.00 (paper)
This accessibly written study describes the clandestine lives of members of a self-settled, Pentecostalist, Burundian refugee community living and working illegally in Dar es Salaam. The author's fieldwork among these young urban- based men provides a refreshing change in perspective from most studies of African refugees that focus on refugees living in camps. Although based upon a small sample of key informants--Pasteur Albert, John, James, Luka, William, and Marco--the results provide important qualitative data on the situation of an estimated three-quarters of all African refugees, who are self-settled rather than inhabitants of UNHCR refugee camps.
The first half of the book contextualizes the urban migrants' situation in terms of their historical experience, life in the refugee camps, and the Tanzanian authorities' attitudes and policies towards urban migrants, especially young men. The latter part of the book traces the networks and strategies that the young men employed to get from their rural refugee settlements to establish themselves safely in Dar es Salaam with secure jobs and accommodation. The importance of patronage emerges clearly from these accounts, though I suspect that slightly too much significance is given to the Pentecostal Church, rather than to the continuation of forms of patron-client relations central to Burundian society. An interesting sub-theme of the presentation is the analysis of Lugha ya Wahuni--the Dar es Salaam youths' patois--whose vivid and provocative idioms and cliches offer a vibrant commentary on life in Dar es Salaam that Sommers exploits to good effect.
The analysis focuses on the interminable uncertainty of these refugees' lives, discussed mostly in terms of fear. As infants or very young children, these men fled Burundi during the Tutsi massacres of Hutu in 1972. Although mostly unable to remember these events for themselves, the terror of this period has traumatized their families and led to the constant worry that the Tutsi still seek to kill them. Fear, Sommers argues, pervades their life experience, and is therefore central in the identity construction of these second-generation Hutu refugees.
Finding themselves in refugee settlements with little or no prospect of return in the foreseeable future, Burundian Hutu elders turned memories of ethnic holocaust into historical narratives that strengthened group solidarity and connected the children of genocide survivors to the traumatizing experiences of their parents. These narratives stereotyped the Hutu as victimized for generations by murderous Tutsi adversaries. Although these accounts of the past inspired genocidal violence by Hutu extremists in Rwanda in 1994, in the refugee settlements they enabled the young refugees to identify themselves as Burundian nationals and ethnic Hutu. This history infused the young refugees with a culturally transmitted terror, which Sommers characterizes with the term 'cultural fear'.
Sommers uses the idea of cultural fear to explain why the Burundian urban migrants' fears go beyond the realities of being illegal urban migrants. While urban Tanzanian migrants refer to 'anxieties' when discussing life in Dar es Salaam, Burundian refugees talk of 'being afraid'. The emotional difference between these, Sommers argues, reflects the role of 'cultural fear' in the Burundian refugees' lives.
The occasional tendency for self-congratulation in the author's description of fieldwork spoils what is otherwise an
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interesting account of the challenge of adapting research plans to suit a changing situation. The use of snowballing techniques is central to urban ethnography, but in this case was made more difficult by the mostly illegal lives of those studied. Given the small number of informants, the author does not convincingly demonstrate why these interesting case studies should be applicable to all 'Burundi refugees in urban Tanzania', as the subtitle suggests.
With such a limited base of informants, one is forced to wonder how much William's excessive paranoia affected the atmosphere in the tailoring shop and influenced Sommers's analytic bias to 'cultural fear'. Although paranoia, suspicion, uncertainty, anxiety, terror, horror, and so on, are mentioned, Sommers does not systematically explore why these terms should be reduced to 'cultural fear', even less so from a Burundian Hutu perspective. This absence has led him to overstate his position: 'In the case of young Burundi refugees, cultural fear was the lens through which they perceived reality' (p. 185). One inevitably thinks of informants such as Luka, who were not dominated by cultural fear, and yet who represent a significant proportion of those consulted.
JEROME LEWIS
London School of Economics and Political Science Lewis, Jerome
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lewis, Jerome. "Fear in Bongoland: Burundi refugees in urban Tanzania." Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, vol. 11, no. 1, 2005, p. 183. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA131053591&it=r&asid=32a08284d12d28127b59068fdf611b0f. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A131053591
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Challenging Assumptions about Africa’s Exploding Youth Population
BU scholar’s new book calls for reforms
07.21.2016By Susan Seligson
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Photo of Marc Sommers
BU African Studies researcher Marc Sommers’ new book argues for rethinking the status quo to meet the challenges of Africa’s youth population explosion. Photo by Lesley-Anne Long
Marc Sommers’ interest in Africa’s youth dates back more than three decades to his work in Kenya, where he was headmaster of a girls’ secondary school. In the ensuing years, he has returned to Africa routinely as a scholar and analyst, and his growing body of research suggests that the prevailing wisdom about the continent’s youth is misguided and calls for significant reform. As a visiting researcher with the African Studies Center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Sommers (CAS’94) has written about postwar youth in Rwanda and South Sudan, among many other nations.
His new book, The Outcast Majority: War, Development, and Youth in Africa (University of Georgia Press), invites policymakers, practitioners, academics, students, and others to revise their thinking about war, development, and youth. The book concludes with a framework for reforming international development practice and policy.
With 200 million people age 15 to 24, Africa has the youngest population in the world. The current trend indicates that this figure will double by 2045, according to the 2012 African Economic Outlook report prepared by experts from the African Development Bank, the UN Development Program, and the UN Economic Commission for Africa, among others. A new study by the UN children’s agency UNICEF concludes that at current rates, by 2100 almost half the children under 18 in the world will be African. Already, according to the World Bank, youth account for 60 percent of all African unemployed. And Sommers points out that African joblessness disproportionately affects young women, who, even if they have skills, have more difficulty getting jobs compared with young men.
In addition to archival research, Sommers’ book draws on fieldwork involving hundreds of interviews with youth in war-affected African countries as well as sources in government, NGO, and development agencies. The work led him, he writes, to “a growing sense that the status quo won’t work.”
BU Today spoke with Sommers about Africa’s rapidly expanding youth population, and why linking youth unemployment to national instability and unrest is not an accurate assumption.
BU Today: What sparked your initial interest in Africa’s youth?
Sommers: I was a headmaster of a girls’ high school in western Kenya from 1982 to 1984. I was 23 and went there to teach English. As I was the only one with a bachelor’s degree teaching at my school, I was asked to be the headmaster. There I was introduced to gender and youth issues and what it’s like to be an adolescent girl, and a young woman. It was a major experience.
Were the ideas presented in the book taking shape over a long period?
The motivation for the book was my having done work on youth and education during and after wars for over 20 years. Increasingly, I realized that the current approach to dealing with Africa’s enormous youth populations will never work, and sometimes makes things worse. So that was the motivation, and I was fortunate enough to get a Woodrow Wilson International Fellowship, so I was able wrote the first half of the book at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Outcast Majority Book Cover
What type of fieldwork did you do for the book?
I did a lot of interviews with donors or implementers, practitioners in the field. And I drew on interviews with youth in 13 war-affected countries. I also interviewed African government officials. One thing I learned is about subtext: when you say youth in the development field, you’re really saying male youth. And that’s generated by a fear of male youth, and those unprecedented numbers of young people, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, creating real worry for governments. When I interviewed them, people said they know the development response is inadequate. But they’re not really sure what to do.
How did your findings collide with the conventional wisdom?
What I found countered the notion that if you have so many young people and not enough jobs, you’ll have unrest. The evidence doesn’t back that up. The demographics known as the “youth bulge” across Africa and most of the Middle East would cause instability just about everywhere, if it were true. But that isn’t happening. In Africa most civil wars are over, and most countries in Africa haven’t had wars, although there are still very serious situations in countries like Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Burundi, and South Sudan. But it just doesn’t follow that having huge numbers of youth means instability. There are far more cases where youth bulge countries haven’t had violence and instability.
What’s the main result of these assumptions?
That negative take, that fear, that concern, is what dominates perceptions of young people in a big part of the world. But if we take a careful look, what we see instead is the question, why are most youths so peaceful? The book uses that as a starting point: here’s what really is going on. And the irony examined in the book is that most youth see themselves as members of an outcast minority, rather than belonging to a majority. They see themselves as outsiders, working in a sea of exclusion.
What’s the role of NGOs in addressing the sea of exclusion you describe?
I learned that how development works is there’s tremendous pressure to demonstrate success. Development work has become very quantitative. Often agencies are under pressure to deliver statistical success. One unspoken issue is that in some cases elite youth are put into programs because it helps you get the numbers to generate the positive results they need. It’s a way to generate success. Some donor officials reported that they are aware of it, and nobody seems to feel good about this. But in interviews, donor and implementing agency officials explained that this is the system, this is how it works. Often the result is that favored youth are the ones who get into these highly valued programs. The other very unintentional result is being seen as effectively supporting a government that may not be popular in response to pressure to demonstrate success.
How might this problem be addressed?
There needs to be strategic targeting, to do an assessment and then prioritize. How can you demonstrate inclusion that is reasonable in an environment of exclusion? My framework recommends reforms for development practice. Education systems in Africa are set up so that most youth can’t get into secondary school; it’s been hard enough to get people into primary school. The unit cost per student for secondary school is through the roof, and in general children who go on to secondary school can’t farm afterward. The starting point is to do mainly qualitative research to find out about the context of the target group, and generate from that research which policies or practices you’re going to address. Then you advocate for reform. Most youths in Africa can’t gain recognition as adults, and there’s a huge population of unmarried mothers, which generally is thought to be shameful, in cultural terms.
So you’re saying that you can’t target populations for development and aid until you know what kinds of stresses they’re facing?
Yes. A challenge for many female youth, for example, is there’s no one to marry. Then a whole trajectory starts that is pretty much a downward one, one that’s not supposed to be happening and yet it’s happening in massive numbers. You can’t target that population effectively if you don’t know about them, and you can’t understand youth situations if you don’t address how they become adults—and whether they succeed or fail. You need a combination of policy and practice, with strategically targeted programs.
The problems you write about seem so overwhelming. Are you hopeful things will improve?
I think in a way the book is upbeat. It talks about things that need to be talked about, and it provides a response with a detailed framework. So I am hopeful.
I’ve interviewed a lot of government officials working at local levels who are very aware of the challenge. It’s crucial to listen to uneducated youth. A lot of people working in developing countries don’t talk to poor people, as often there isn’t any time. They get to the office to address a mountain of emails. When there are so many meetings and emails, how are you going to find time to talk to ordinary people?
My book is saying it’s hard to do sustainable development in a way that’s successful when there’s such a distance between practitioners and ordinary people. The reform framework at the end of my book suggests a positive way forward.
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Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood by Marc Sommers (review)
Susan Thomson
From: African Studies Review
Volume 56, Number 1, April 2013
pp. 180-182 | 10.1353/arw.2013.0018
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Susan Thomson
Marc Sommers. Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. xxiv + 281pp. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $22.95. Paper.
Marc Sommers has written a remarkable book on the plight of youth in postgenocide Rwanda. Sommers’s findings draw upon semistructured interviews with central and local government officials, as well as focus groups and questionnaires with youth, meaning Rwandans between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five. Adults living in Sommers’s two urban and three rural research settings were also interviewed on issues confronting Rwandan youth since [End Page 180] the 1994 genocide. The bulk of Sommers’s sample was made up of poor, unemployed male youth with no more than a primary school education. His is the first systematic and book-length study that confronts the often discussed but little analyzed matter of young Rwandans striving to reach adulthood. In remedy, Stuck offers profound policy insights on the “imminent prospect of producing almost an entire generation of failed adults” (193). To make his case, Sommers assesses the likelihood of Rwandan youth remaining “stuck” in not only failing to acquire sociocultural adulthood through marriage, land acquisition, and building one’s own family home, but also through limited employment and other economic opportunities. The results are astounding—the book’s descriptive accounts show that the land and agriculture policies of the government of Rwanda are currently failing the majority of its youth, both male and female. This failure is sizeable, considering that three in four Rwandans are under the age of thirty. Central to the bleak picture that Sommers paints for everyday youth realities is the idea that uneducated, poor youth want government support, and indeed, they look to the government for socioeconomic assistance. He also finds, contrary to what most policymakers believe, that youth do not present a “major risk to renewed fighting and conflict” (198). The book ends with a list of policy recommendations for both the Rwandan government and various actors working with youth in postconflict and development situations.
Sommers’s commitment to producing a study that is policy relevant is the primary weakness of his study, as he trades academic rigor for popular appeal. Stuck lacks a clear theoretical framework. Instead, the author works through the concepts of failed masculinity, rapid urbanization, and strong government without sufficiently explaining why he chose this approach for analyzing his interview material. For readers intimately familiar with the Rwandan context, the choice is obvious—the postgenocide government has introduced a variety of institutional and cultural changes through its ambitious postgenocide reconciliation and reconstruction policies. Sommers does not adequately analyze the reasons why the government introduced these policies, nor does he assess its rationale for seeking to make such dramatic social, political, and economic changes—changes that directly affect youth, male youth in particular, as postgenocide policies are rooted in a fairly one-dimensional and negative view of pregenocide society and culture. Sommers does not situate his analysis within this broader context, central to which is the government’s effort to change how Rwandans understand themselves and the new postgenocide order. These behavioral and cultural changes require all Rwandans to stop using the labels of “Hutu,” “Tutsi,” and “Twa,” and instead to focus on becoming “Rwandan.” This matters, because this government has implemented a policy of maximal prosecution of male Hutu who were resident in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, and the policy of behavioral change targets youth. Presumably, most if not all of the young men that Sommers consulted have direct experience with these changes, yet their lived realities are not assessed through this essential prism. [End Page 181]
Sommers’s recommendations to the Rwandan government—that it vigorously advocate for crucial priorities and reform its approach to youth concerns—are muted by a lack of meaningful analysis of both the institutional and cultural context in which youth live their lives since the genocide. For example, Sommers interprets much of the interview material he gathered from Rwandan youth through local actors (notably Sector and Cell officials). As he does not contextualize Rwanda’s policy-making environment, readers are not aware that the Rwandan government makes policy that is enforced...
Brinkman on Sommers, 'Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania'
Author:
Marc Sommers
Reviewer:
Inge Brinkman
Marc Sommers. Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. xviii + 219 pp. $22.50 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57181-331-2; $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57181-263-6.
Reviewed by Inge Brinkman (Department of African Languages and Cultures, University of Ghent)
Published on H-Africa (December, 2002)
Fear in Bongoland
Fear in Bongoland
This book is the story of John, William, and James in Bongoland. As young Burundian refugees, these men illegally migrated from refugee settlements in central Tanzania to the capital Dar es Salaam, popularly known as Bongoland. In Bongoland (Brainland) only those with wits and cunning can survive. The author describes the ways in which these young migrants cope with the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and secrecy that marks their lives.
Although for all city-dwellers the danger of violence and crime is a source of fear and concern, the refugees view their situation as particularly fraught with risks and hazards. These dangers may not only come from Tanzanian officials and policemen, but also from Tanzanian citizens, and especially from fellow refugees. The Tutsi are seen by these Hutu refugees as an imminent threat, who dispose of many allies. In more formal historical imagining Hutu identity is presented as unified: the Hutu are portrayed as the collective victim of Tutsi hatred.
Yet, beneath this veneer of Hutu harmony, Hutu refugees are sharply divided internally. Both Imbo and Banyaruguru Hutu sub-groups accuse each other of aiding the Tutsi to eliminate their fellow Hutu and give a self-portrayal of innocence and victimhood. While the myth of Hutu ethnic purity has been studied in detail, Marc Sommers has contributed a more layered perspective: ethnic purity comes in degrees (p. 61). His analysis of Imbo and Banyaruguru tensions is an apt illustration of how fear can become omnipresent and a determining factor in all dealings with other people.
In the context in which Sommers worked it may not have been easy to find out more about these tensions. As one refugee put it,"Who told you our secret?" (p. 49). It is to the author's credit that he has pursued this subject in such detail. In the shop where the young men work as tailors all visitors are treated with circumspection as anyone could be an informer and everybody may be a spy. Issues that relate to refugee status are carefully avoided in conversations and if Burundi or other places that betray the refugees' origin are mentioned at all, it is done in a veiled way.
Marc Sommers shows the importance of language usage where some words are never said, while others are only understood by a small circle of trusted people. The use of specific linguistic codes is important not only for refugee migrants. For newcomers who flock to town, Tanzanians and foreigners alike, knowledge of the youth language in Dar es Salaam is a means to show that they are well-versed in street life and know how to survive in Bongoland. Yet, this sort of knowledge has clear moral implications, for the youth language is also known as lugha ya wahuni, or the "language of the ignorant." Respectable elders frown upon the quick-witted slang, and for fundamentalist Christians merely hearing the youth language is sinful.
For youngsters who belong to such fundamentalist Christian churches, there is the constant dilemma of wishing to integrate into town life as quickly as possible and living up to the expectations of their church denomination. In Fear in Bongoland the role of the Pentecostal church among the refugees is studied in detail. Hitherto very little has been written about the religious life of refugees and Sommers's attention to this issue leads to important insights and conclusions. The owner of the shop in which the tailors work is a devout pastor and the young men are under considerable pressure to follow his guidelines concerning righteous and sinful behavior.
Despite this pressure, the young men, each in his own way, develop their own standards for evaluating their deeds. They try to avoid sin and Satan, and they believe that by doing so they reduce the possibility of falling into Tutsi hands or being harassed by Tanzanian officials. Their religious belief forms "a code of behaviour for succeeding in the city after reaching there, and a source of spiritual uplift and empowerment" (p. 179).
Other studies have pointed to the importance of churches in building up a network in which people help and trust each other. In the Pentecostal church to which John, William, James and other Burundian refugees belong, this is hardly the case. Young men may find their patrons through the church, but the church does not form a close-knit community where youngsters may meet friends or help each other. Although the church members worship and pray together, they hardly ever communicate on a more personal level with other church members. Also in this context, talk about refugee issues is avoided, for the fear, suspicion and tension that refugees describe preclude the building up of large networks of friends and trustees. In John's words, "Too many friends could only bring trouble" (p. 169).
Marc Sommers's book is a well-written and fascinating narrative that fits well into the recent spate of refugee studies dealing with the cultural aspects of living in exile. The author explores the importance of language, the crucial role of religion and the relations between work and coping strategies in town. These various aspects of refugee migrant life do not remain bloodless issues on the researcher's agenda; through the words and deeds of John, William, James, and other young men these aspects become a lived reality.
Fear in Bongoland has become the personal account of these young male refugee migrants and the various ways in which they deal with their fears. Although the dangers they describe do not necessarily stem from direct harassment and violence in the city, fear and hiding may be seen as key terms in these young men's lives. The strategies they live by include limiting their public action and speech to a specific manner in which they want to present themselves. These public personae hide some aspects of their character, while deliberately emphasising other traits. Although the young men are bound by political constraints and social obligations, each one of them manages to create a living space.
Sommers discusses many aspects of work in the tailor shop in which the young men work. On the one hand this leads to a multi-faceted and layered study. On the other hand, sometimes one wished that the author had woven these various aspects more closely into the overall argument as in the present form some ends remain loose. Thus it is not easy to see how a discussion of the various cloths and sewing techniques contributes to an understanding of the fear of Burundian refugees (pp. 108-110). Perhaps a stronger theoretical framework could have helped to integrate these aspects more fully into the account.
In theoretical terms, the study is not without its flaws. Thus the author announces his book as a "gender study" (p. 12). Yet, writing about men (or about women, for that matter), does not automatically make a book a gender study. In fact the book tells us little about the construction of masculinity and relations between the sexes in Bongoland. Also the theoretical concept the author uses to denote the specific fears that refugees describe could have been developed further.
Sommers uses the term "cultural fear" to indicate that many of the fears are not based on tangible, direct threats, but are related to the refugee culture in which these young men were raised. Fear, the author indicates, is a key term in the definition of a refugee, i.e., refugees are those with a "well-founded fear of being persecuted" (p. 183). Yet, the idea of asylum is of course to end such fear and find a place where people are safe from their persecutors. The facts that refugees export their fears with their flight and that even young men (who only vaguely remember the atrocities on which these cultural fears are based) describe these fears and act upon them indicates the limits of the present definitions of refugees and asylum. The author fails to draw conclusions in this realm and merely states that "Burundians are ruled by fear" (p. 186). His own analysis, however, shows that John, James, William and other refugees are only partly ruled by their fears, while, at the same time, they manage to overcome them.
Finally, one wonders whether only refugees have to cope with such cultural fears. Do not many people all over the world express fears that have only limited substantial basis and combine discontent and deprivation with culturally and historically imbued stereotypes about others? The theoretical explanation does not make clear whether or not a history of trauma is a defining characteristic in the concept of cultural fear, or vice versa.
Despite these flaws, the combination of a broad perspective on exile, work, language, and religion and a personal account of people living with fear renders this book highly recommendable for students of refugee issues, social history, popular culture and new religious movements in Africa.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=6993
Citation: Inge Brinkman. Review of Sommers, Marc, Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. December, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6993
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