Den svenske udviklingsforsker, Mats Utas, opholdt sig to år i Sierra Leones hovedstad, Freetown, og oplevede hvor udsatte, lidet ansete og magtesløse mange yngre – og også modne – mænd føler sig, når de ikke har et ordentligt job og dermed ikke kan forsørge en kone og blive gift.
Det beretter han om i sin seneste blog som medarbejder på Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (NAI) i Uppsala i Sverige med overskriften “Youth as a social age” (03.05.12).
Two tales from Freetown drawn from Mats Utas’ fieldwork there illustrates how marginalized men are often regarded as youths if they are not married or have no proper jobs, no matter what their actual age.
“Youth in West Africa is a social category of people living in tough conditions on the very edges of survival. They are no longer children, but have yet to become social adults”, says Mats Utas.
It is the number of these social youths that threaten stability in many African countries. However, it is not the groups of marginalized men that start wars themselves. People with political agendas do.
“If the youth had better salaried opportunities, they would take fewer risks. Then it would be too costly for Big Men to wage war, says Mats Utas.
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Af Mats Utas
JUSTICE, I call him so because he is obsessed (opslugt) with justice, or maybe rather the lack of it in current day Sierra Leone. Justice quite often comes down to the street corner with minor bruises and scratch marks in his face or on his arms.
People tend to laugh at him because it is his girlfriend doing this damage to him. She is a few years younger than Justice, who is in his mid-twenties. Justice is a typical Freetown street-dweller, although not one of the poorest as he, at least, has a roof over his head.
His girlfriend is a prostitute that we hardly see, but we talk about her quite often. Justice does not want her to ply the streets at night, but when he tries to force her to stay home at night she fights him. It is not easy to keep a girlfriend if you are poor he says.
Among the young men in the street corner we talk a lot about this. Many say they cannot afford to keep a girlfriend at all and furthermore knows that if someone with more economic leverage (midler) comes a long one’s girlfriend is frequently lost without battle. They also talk about the humiliating (ydmygende) and unsettling fact that if they have a girlfriend she is most often a prostitute.
It is painful to share your girlfriend with other men they all agree upon. To make things worse such girlfriends also have more money than them a fact that helps to turn traditional gender roles upside down, making the young men in the street corner into dependents.
With reference to this, those in the street corner who fought in the Sierra Leonean civil war often dream about the days of the war when they “controlled” their girlfriends and frequently could afford to entertain several at the same time. Today however they have been remarginalized into what they see as a chronic state of youthhood.
SIXTIES, his name stems from the fact that he likes to wear clothes from that era, is around 30. He never fought the war but has been living in the streets since he was 13.
His grandmother used to work for the British queen in England, now she is an alcoholic. Sixties arduously tries to keep her out of the streets. Sixties works as a taxi driver. It does not render much money unless one has his own car, but it gives him some social standing.
He is well aware of the fact that to establish oneself as a man – at thirty getting out of the youth moratorium – he needs to get married and have children. As the only one in the streetscape he manages to find himself a bride to marry: Sarah.
Fact given Sarah’s family doubts that she will ever find a “proper” man and Sixties is something of an emergency solution to finally get her out of the house. The wedding is a confusing event where “street” meets “house”; where a rayray boy (street boy) marries a house pekin (someone still in the house – not gone astray) as is be put in local parlor (slang).
Time of peace and happiness follows as they move into a small shed, nicely built by Sixties himself, in a nearby slum. But Sarah can not get pregnant, or maybe Sixties dramatic consumption of weed (marihuana) makes him infertile. Sarah pretends however to be pregnant and instead of delivering a child decides to kidnap one (this story is too detailed for this space, but it is worth a tale of itself).
When the story breaks it becomes first page news in the Freetonian papers. It leaves Sixties totally humiliated going mentally off for some time. However Sixties is strong and manages to get his act together and currently he has found himself a new woman that he intends to marry.
These are just two short stories from a street corner in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone, with the ironic name Pentagon.
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