The two other groups share a lot. They both came to Bujumbura deliberately. They are both upwardly mobile, even if only slightly or only potentially. They are often poor, living under tough circumstances, working hard to survive, frustrated by their poverty and afraid of the future – but, nevertheless, they have a sense of momentum, of potential, if things work out.
One of the most striking research results was the significant difference that exists between urban immigrants and urban people born in the city. Among the latter, anomie is much higher, and the deep sense of capitalist ethic was expressed much less frequently. More of the young people who spent all their days hanging out at the ligala were urban born. More of those who had no plans or hope for the future were urban born. More of those who joined the rebels – or the self-defense forces – were urban born. More of the young men who had children out of wed-lock were urban born. In our interviews, the urban-born young people were not poorer than the rural-born ones, so objective facts do not explain this. What differentiates them, I believe, are subjective factors: whom they compare themselves to, and what trajectory they see their lives as being on. In simple terms, the rural-to-urban migrants compare themselves to their countryside fellow men, and, of course, to how they were before they came to the city. While they are by all standards poor – and they know it: it is not ignorance which drives this – they consider them-selves relatively better off than before, or than their rural peers, and many of them also have the sense that, with luck and hard work, they can improve their fate further. Urban-born boys are in a very different situation. Many of them have been distinctly downwardly mobile, as the economy has slowed over the years, as households have fallen apart, as their own parents have not managed to live up to their responsibilities. At the same time, their comparison group is the urban rich – not the rural poor, with whom they have no contact. For them, it is the lives behind the high walls in the quartiers des chefs which constitute their comparison level, the big cars with tinted windows speeding by which they wish to possess, the well-dressed and drunk people coming out of nightclubs with sexy women on their arms who they aspire to be.
There is probably a third element at work as well in explaining the difference between urban-born and immigrant young men in Bujumbura, namely the lower social control in the city compared to the countryside. In the rural world, children, when not in school, cannot go far: there is always someone around who knows them, and there is little mischief to be had in any case. In the city, clearly, there are many more temptations and opportunities. As a result, urban-born young men fall more easily into trajectories of nihilism and drugs.
Social mobility
We asked all our interviewees what the situation of people their own age was, and if people could change social categories in life. Not surprisingly, almost every single person we talked to told us that the situation of young people, whether women or men, is generally not good. There is deep unhappiness with the lack of work and the depth of poverty in Burundi, in both rural and urban areas. Equally unsurprisingly, the first answer to the ‘what would you do if you were admicom [administrateur communal – communal administrator]’ question relates to jobs, at least in the city; in the countryside, to assistance. The few exceptions included some rural people who seemed to feel at ease with their prospects, mainly in Nyanza-Lac, as well as some of the urban highest-income group, who seemed to be talking about another country altogether: ‘Young people follow the classical path of going to university. Then they get work in public or private sector outfits. Those who fail emigrate to the West.’ (This is a quote from a retired army officer.)
A limited number of factors are widely considered the prime drivers of people’s economic station in life. High up comes education – unsurprisingly. Parental situation was mentioned often, as well: how wealthy a boy’s or a girl’s parents are; the values parents instilled in their children; the degree of division that reigns in the family (for example, it is widely understood that children from polygamous marriages fare less well in life because of the divisions in the household). As a nineteen-year-old urban man told us:
Those who have parents who work, they study. The others don’t study: if your parents are too poor and you don’t get enough food in the stomach, you cannot study. Some of those who didn’t study are lucky enough to have jobs – work on buses, for example. Others have no work at all, so they don’t do anything, or get occasional small jobs. Even the children of ministers are afraid their parents will die and they will fall deeply.
For women, marriage was also frequently mentioned as a determinant of well-being. Marriage can bring economic and, especially, social security. This thirty-year-old rural man summed up prevailing wisdom:
Girls’ situation is completely dependent on the men they marry. If they come from a rich family, and marry a poor man, they can become a lot worse off – and vice versa. Unmarried girls either come from rich families and have easy lives, or they come from poor families. If the parents are dynamic, their situations can improve. When the parents are not dynamic, they stay poor.
But far and away the most popular explanation of people’s economic situation falls under the rubric of ‘personal character.’ This whole area of personal responsibility, success and failure, and social marginalization is at the very heart of how Burundians interpret their society.
Very often, conversations contain references to the centre de negoce and the ligala and, for women, ‘prostitution.’ These are the key words to describe people who don’t live the way society values – ‘deviant’ or ‘marginal’ people, in sociological language. The centre de negoce refers to a market area, often very small, where people come to buy and sell things. There is often a slew of little bars there, maybe someone selling goat brochettes, a couple of boutiques and vegetable sellers, and a few artisan shops – bike and shoe repair, maybe. Youth hangs out there, especially in the afternoon. Ligala is a Swahili word that simply denotes a place to hang out. It could be any public place where people congregate. It is a word with a negative connotation – as is centre de negoce, when used in this way. There is an element of idleness associated with it, of drunkenness, of menace and petty criminality. In Bujumbura, it also has an association with the violent events of the beginning of the war: gangs of youth hanging out at ligalas undertook many of the brutal killings during those awful years. ‘Prostitution’ similarly denotes a fall from grace, a failure to live up to expectations of productivity and chastity by women. All these, then, are images used mainly for young people, and their power lies in their association with failure.
Words describing moralistic or deviant behavior appeared in a whopping 185 conversations – in other words, more than half of all those with whom we spoke about the situation of young people spontaneously talked about prostitution and/or the ligala. Especially in the city, this was a constant refrain: it appeared 145 times there (out of approximately 170, meaning that more than 80 percent of all conversations we had in the city included mention of prostitution and criminality). In the rural areas, the frequency was about one quarter.
TABLE 5.3 Discussions, and explanations, of men’s marginal behavior
<30 >30 M F Rural Urban Total
Poverty
9 8 14 3 10 7 17
Value changes
14 5 15 4 6 13 19
Laziness and other character flaws
29 5 21 12 6 28 34
No explanation
11 6 9 8 4 13 17
total
63 24 59 27 26 61 87
TABLE 5.4 Discussions, and explanations, of women’s marginal behavior
<30 >30 M F Rural Urban Total
Poverty
27 7 24 10 3 31 34
Value changes
17 3 11 9 3 17 20
Laziness and other character flaws
18 5 18 5 6 17 23
No explanation
16 5 16 5 2 19 21
total
78 20 69 29 14 84 98
But people did not all
give the same explanation for these phenomena. In one discourse, the situation of marginal youth was explained by their character weakness. ‘Many young men behave well, but some do not. Those young men think they behave in modern, developed ways, but this is dirty behavior, a step back. […] They are the ones who brought AIDS here’ (twenty-three-year-old male farmer, Nyanza-Lac). Or this thirty-year-old bike taxi driver: ‘I know young men who are afraid of jobs that demand a lot of effort. It is this category of youth that becomes lazy and transforms itself into bandits when evening comes. When you work hard you will obtain the necessary for yourself and your family.’ Or listen to this twenty-year-old poor returned refugee’s judgment about women:
Most young women are hypocrites. When they finish the morning work, they make themselves beautiful and start to circulate in the streets. I admire those from the neighboring collines who are more disciplined and love to cultivate the land. When they have finished the morning work, young men and women often meet at the ligala and behave as couples. Then they go to the bars. There are those who listen to the advice of their parents and those who just do what comes up in their heads.
Their responses reflect a very conservative, moralistic interpretation of social reality. We found it everywhere, not just among certain groups: this discourse seems determined not by an objective structural position, but rather by a person’s values – their religious values and parental education and personal trajectory.
A very different explanation is what we could call the progressive one (in scholarly terms it would be called ‘structural’). In this interpretation, the situation of marginal youth is not the result of their bad behavior, but of the debilitating constraints of poverty, unemployment, and insecurity. ‘Everybody here wants to work, the whole city in Bujumbura. They are waiting, even at the ligala, but they can’t find any work. Young people don’t choose to sit down if there is work for them to be had. This also holds for those who are in the ligala: it is not laziness, but lack of work that brings them here’ (thirty-year-old ramasseur de bus – responsible for passenger loading – Musaga). A twenty-four-year-old female farmer who was also sous-chef de colline and head of an association describes it thus: ‘Young men have nothing to do. They display bad behavior, debauchery, drinking, they don’t have jobs and hang out in the streets. The bad behavior is caused by having nothing to do.’
Probably not surprisingly, those whom we interviewed who were themselves marginalized youth often (but by no means always) adhered to this analysis. For example, this is how a twenty-three-year-old refugee explains her life: ‘I lived with my paternal grandfather, but he is poor and I had to fend for myself, and that is how I started to frequent men, not because I like it but only to have enough to eat.’ This argument is made a lot more frequently about women than about men, often involving the explanation that it is much harder for women to find decent work than for men.
A third position argues that society has changed, values have deteriorated, bad examples abound, cultural pressures weaken morals, and families do not educate their children well anymore. Quite frequently, in this interpretation, international factors are invoked: foreign movies, the presence of Bazungu, the UN peacekeeping mission (ONUB). ‘Young women don’t have good behavior, but it is the behavior of the parents that explains that. If the parents let them often go to the cinema, no wonder their behavior will be marginal’ (seventeen-year-old urban IDP). ‘Youth here is like in any other city: they only think of having fun. It is the same thing for girls: you see them walking in the street with their telephones, doing nothing’ (nineteen-year-old former child soldier).
Burundians, thus, display a wide range of ideological positions on the issue of marginal youth. Essentially, the same sort of political positions that exist in Western societies can be found among ordinary Burundians. They range from conservative to progressive and differ in the degree of individual versus collective responsibility they assign. These opinions seem to cut across location, gender, and economic class. In other words, people’s analyses are more than structurally determined: they make choices in terms of their values, their background, their sense of direction, their religion, etc. Note that the presence of this sort of ideological cleavage makes it perfectly possible to envision party politics in Burundi: there is more to the country than ethnic politics.
Our results counter a certain interpretation of gender roles in Africa. On the one hand, they do confirm what has been found elsewhere, namely how labeling can be a potent form of social control. From colonial Uganda and Asante to modern-day Rwanda, researchers have found that women, adjusting to economic pressure by taking on roles traditionally reserved for men, are often labeled as prostitutes, and ‘loose women’ (Allman 2001: 131–43; Musisi 2001: 181–4; Jefremovas 1991: 379). Such labeling is especially prevalent in countries that have experienced instability or undergone rapid change, as is certainly the case in Burundi (Hodgson and McCurdy 2001: 114; Enloe 2005). Our results differ significantly from this literature, however, in two ways. First, in our conversations, this discourse on character weakness applied more to men than to women. Second, other discourses, regarding both men and women, were also often heard.
Indeed, contrary to much of the literature that treats this sort of discourse as applying only to women – a particular form of gendered stereotyping and, ultimately, symbolic gendered violence – it is to men that it is more frequently applied. By far the most prevalent approach to marginal men is the moralistic, conservative one. In my recollection, many of the harshest judges of young men are other young men, often migrants who have come to the city in recent years fleeing rural misery and unemployment. They work very hard, barely scraping by, sending money to their families, saving to build a house at home or to improve their business. Their negative judgment is of those – often urban born – who they believe let themselves go, flee into drinking and drugs, and generally don’t try hard enough.
The progressive explanation is far more prevalent for women than for men. Men’s ‘deviant’ behavior is explained by poverty by 24 percent of the people we spoke to, whereas for women this figure is 44 percent. Clearly, people generally are more understanding of the fate of women: they had less choice, people are telling me – their lives are harder. This assessment prevails among both women and men – but in our interviews it is actually among men that this interpretation is more prevalent. This is interesting, for these same people live lives in which traditional gender roles still dominate. It is as if they are looking in from the outside, knowing and analyzing what happens to women – but still maintaining the traditional roles.
Our discussions of mobility shed more light on this. Frequently, after the previous question about the situation of young men/women, we added a follow-up question, namely: ‘Is it possible for people to change categories?’ This was our way of probing into people’s analysis of social mobility. Frankly, I expected that the large majority of people would answer me negatively, telling me that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. To my great surprise, we heard many more affirmative answers than negative ones: the majority of Burundian youth told me that social mobility is possible, and they had arguments and examples about how it can be done. Note that most of them were clear that it was not a frequent occurrence, and that downward social mobility is more likely than upward social mobility. Nevertheless, this deep sense of potential mobility surprised me. The key factors involved are hard work and perseverance, good management, and dynamism. Just hear their voices.
Hard work and perseverance
There is social mobility. All families in this camp lost everything, including their house, when they came here. Some were discouraged, had no hope to continue living, let go. They became indigent. Others, notwithstanding theft and despair, started again, looked for opportunities and improved their situation very much. (Eighteen-year-old female student, Ruhororo)
I know young men who work during the day in security and study at night. Other young men manage to improve their busi
nesses. I know a young man who began by selling three pants and now he has so many he can’t put them on his shoulder anymore and had to get a stand at the market to sell them. His business is bigger than 200,000 francs now. Others, by bad luck or bad management, don’t manage to progress or even fall into bankruptcy. (Twenty-nine-year-old poor migrant worker, Musaga)
At some point, we asked people what would happen if they were unable to achieve their goals. Most of our interviewees displayed an astounding amount of perseverance and tenacity. Many people sounded more fatalistic – whatever befell them was part of God’s larger plan – but even then, there was a deep ® undercurrent of perseverance. Here are some examples:
In all cases I’d continue to seek for whatever may be possible. I will not give up without having enough to feed my children. (Twenty-three-year-old female IDP in the lowest economic category, Musaga)
After the war, there are those dynamic ones who have started to improve the situation. Others, however, have sold everything they had because they became discouraged. (Twenty-nine-year-old female farmer, Ruhororo)
I know a young man who started selling peanuts and who now owns a well-filled boutique, with a value of 300,000 francs. I also know a girl who started selling little things and now bought a piece of land for a value of 300,000 francs. To get there, you need a lot of work and luck because there are many who fail after a certain time. (Twenty-year-old man sewing clothes, Musaga)
After all I have lived through, it would be stupid of me to despair. One must always maintain hope. It has happened to me that I wanted to end my life, but the next day I regretted having thought that. These are moments that you tell yourself it is worthwhile to persevere. (Twenty-three-year-old female refugee in the lowest economic category, Bwiza)
Life After Violence Page 11
