Hi, Malika Boma, and you're listening to a podcast hosted by the Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub,
hosted by Oxford University and the University of Cape Town.
This podcast was recorded as part of a series in Oxford in November 2019 to discuss the theme of understanding adolescence in African contexts.
Thanks for listening. So we're talking about care.
So maybe if I could start with you? What do you understand by adolescence and when you're thinking about it?
What are some of the important issues we need to think about when considering adolescence in context,
adolescents could be defined or looked at in different ways.
Some have decided that they would use the age to define the period of adolescence,
and the common definition by the United Nations is adolescence are a group of people between the ages of 10 to 19 from age 10 to 19,
and some others have made it a bit broader at, say, adolescents are between 12 or usually it ranges between that age.
But the the issues that are common about adolescence is that adolescence is the period where there's a rapid change physically,
socially and when puberty starts. And then, of course, we have all the secondary sexual characteristics.
So there are different things going on during the period of adolescence that biological changes,
that's the growth and changes, development and so on that the emotional changes.
The change from thinking in the concrete way.
Seeing things concretely and in. So that's when the abstract thinking emerges.
And then also it's the period that leads from childhood to adulthood.
So that period that helps you know where the many things happen so that at the end of it, the person is said to be an adult.
And that's why they are very, very vague boundaries in terms of the definition of adolescence and in terms of looking at it in context.
It's that in many cultures, people have, particularly on the African continent,
there have been questions about adolescence because some in many cultures, adolescence ends when people get married.
So in a culture where marriage takes place very early, some you know which is, of course,
we know it's against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
But in many cultures, it still happens. Girls are my age, some as young as 10.
That's when adolescence starts. So where is the period of adolescence for then?
So we if we're talking about adolescence, we need to look at so many factors.
The context is so important that that will determine.
And does the culture recognise that that that there's that period of youth that is there, not children at the same time, they are not adults?
Does the culture, you know, recognise that?
I think those are things we need to think about as we look at adolescence, particularly on the African continent.
So to picking up on that, Cindy, particularly around the issue of contexts.
So when we're thinking about adolescence, is this period of rapid change.
What are in your mind some of the salient features about context in the
interaction with context during adolescence that really shaped that experience?
Well, I think it is, although it's saying in terms of where people live and what's expected of them,
but the kind of differences that we've been speaking about this morning as intersectionality.
But if you are living in a rural area and you have responsibilities in in for care
within your family or getting married at 15 years old and having your own child,
there are so many different aspects that affect whether somebody is cared for or caring.
Unusually, all of us at every stage in the life course of both.
And so adolescence I. In my experience, and I have to say that this workshop has made me realise, oh,
I worked with adolescents, I said before I came here, I only worked with children,
but they were 10, so I worked with adolescents,
but they were learning and I'm going to speak about that case because I think it speaks to that question of context.
They were learning the relationships work wise and familial and environmental.
I was really focussed on agricultural and environmental learning that they needed to learn in order to do the work of the adults in their community.
However, all of the kind of political ecological relationships were changing at that moment because of an agricultural practise.
So here's development, which in fact required more work of children and adolescents and therefore less
possibility of schooling if we think that's a path to a different kind of adulthood.
And yet they were learning the kind of knowledge that they weren't going to be able to easily use in their adulthood.
So to me, so much of what adolescence is is about that transitional period.
And apropos of what Lorraine said this morning about, you know, we're thinking and as adults,
as the endpoint, it seems like every phase of the life course is a fluid period.
And so when we're young adults, it's different than middle age adults and different than old age.
So I think we can imagine ourselves and adolescence in itself as in between childhood and young adulthood.
But the factors that weigh upon children, depending on their gender birth order,
the older girls, I don't know if this has been true in your experience, but in in rural Sudan,
being the oldest girl means you're taking care of your younger siblings and you that when you get the next one is is arrives on the scene,
you don't graduate to get to do something else. You stay in that position.
And younger children have different opportunities. And it's an interesting kind of set of relationships.
So class gender, birth order and whether one is in a rural, urban or interim area are all.
We are all part of the context which makes it impossible for us to speak of adolescence in Africa.
So picking up on that, Lucy, with your coming at it from a slightly older adolescence, I mean,
what are some of the main aspects of context to which you you've observed in your own work,
which are already shaping the experience of those episodes have? I struggle sometimes.
To know how much we should be universalise and how much we should be saying that everything is context dependent because,
you know, and in some ways, it's it's a it's a it's an argument to get where different disciplines get pitted against each other.
And that's quite unhelpful because people just kind of retreat into their into their holes and throw stones at each other.
And so, so in the kind of the biomedical model, you create something and then you, you expand it, you know,
and you scale it to everyone because there's an assumption that there's some shared capacity that that will work.
And in the kind of opposite model is the idea that everything is down to the tiniest contact that every village
you can't translate from one village to the next to a village or from one household to the next door household.
And on one level, you recognise that that's true. And on another level, you think that that's utterly unhelpful if you're going to do anything.
And so that's when, you know, maybe that's the very only the most obvious understanding of context.
But that's where I always struggle, and I don't know the answer to that.
So maybe let's pick up on one piece of that. So in some sense, the interventions are safe in the context.
So we're doing a universal intervention. You're putting some universal aspects to the context.
And so one arguably important aspect of of the context is care.
Also to perhaps to to return to your anchor is what role do you see care playing in the lives of adolescents in particular in the African context?
Sometimes we see this as a period of emerging independence of peer influence.
Is this still a primary role for care? Is it something that we need to think about?
Is it in a universal way?
Oh, I think that the care that adolescents will really benefit from, although I see at the same time we can still salvage as adolescent period,
but I think the care needs to have started even before adolescence.
Yes. You know, many times we forget and we feel, OK, let's get the adolescents.
But adolescents are people that see in between.
Their critical thinking has developed. They're able to be their judgemental.
They need to trust you. They need to know that you're going to be loyal to them.
And it's easier if you have built a relationship with them in their childhood or if someone has is someone yet?
Not necessarily. If someone else had built it so that they learn to trust,
that they know that they will get justice because those issues are even more important in adolescence and the period of adolescence.
The the the, you know, like the way you can tell children things and children will believe you adolescents know because
they see and it's very important for them to that what you're seeing is what you're actually doing.
So in terms of care, I would say the best for my own perspective is care and nurturing and care and friendship
that has started before adolescence by somebody else and that continues through adolescence.
But in the event that the adolescent has not had that benefit of a childhood of care.
I think it's still possible,
but it just that it will take a bit more time and energy and effort because you are building on a foundation that is not there.
I think it's important to. The first thing is to gain friends, to develop friendship, trust and friendship, whichever comes to contact care.
I mean, I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist, so I see adolescents in difficult,
very difficult these severe mental illnesses with depression, with psychotic illnesses.
This still needs to be a relationship you need.
They need to trust you. But those adolescents that I under my care, who I had managed when they were children there,
it's much easier because we've built a friendship over the years.
So I say whatever. Even within the juvenile justice system.
And that's some of the problems we have on the African continent.
The problems of training of the staff who look after the young man, these institutions,
correctional institutions and many times the abuse of not knowing that that all of a sudden
the reason why the adolescent is there is because they've suffered and had difficulties.
And that's why they've broken the law.
And that's why they're in the juvenile justice system and they need understanding and they need friendship even in that state of care.
Yeah. So I want to pick up on that. So this is continuity of care.
So from your own work with younger children going through,
how do you see this interaction of the care that you receive earlier and the care that you receive later,
whether it be good care earlier and bad care later or the changing nature of care?
What is the one thing that I was thinking about is the way that the extended family works as like a caring,
an arena of care in India, at least in my experience in this village and in other places,
in my own family where you have a sense of there are many adults and older kids and younger kids, you know,
but there are many people who are looking out for you and who love you or care for you or feed you, you know, or discipline you.
But there is a way that you are part of a bigger framework.
I mean, when I one of the things that was really striking to me in my fieldwork was a young mother of seven children just died.
I think she had a stroke, you know, I think she probably had high blood pressure, you know, but she just literally dropped dead.
And I thought if that happened in, you know, in a western and, you know,
industrial context for the entire family would fall apart, the father would not have been able to handle this.
But the grandmother stepped in and the aunts and uncles, and they all lived in a big courtyard house, you know, house yard.
So that kind of continuity of. The care and sense that somebody is there for you, not it's not necessary that they are intensely working on you.
But there was a sense of community.
But but another thing that's striking and this is it goes to what I was saying about older daughters in particular.
People were caring for their younger siblings, and you did not have a sense of like, you know, get out of here, I'm going to go play with my friends.
Like, even when you're playing with your friends, you might be holding your baby brother or sister,
or that a three year old is kind of trailing behind you.
And it's part of and I don't want to be romanticise it too much.
But it is a stable formation that we had in the 20th century in the U.S., which is broken down completely.
You know, people don't live in multi-family dwellings anymore.
People don't have a sense of we live in a neighbourhood where we are all looking out for one another's children,
where you might discipline a teenager who's, you know, doing something troubling on the street.
And that teenager would listen to you instead of cursing you out and saying, you have no, I'm, you know, not my mother.
And even if you were in my mother, I might say the same thing. So there's a kind of new family and social formations and and also,
if I could just say about context is the broader global political economic context of what we're glossing as neoliberalism.
But the ways that rural Sudan, for example, adolescence is protracted by virtue of the debt economy people,
these young people growing up cannot make enough money in their jobs of,
you know, like a teacher is not making enough money to get married, to buy the things you need to buy in order to set up your own household.
So there's a lot fewer children later married that we may think that a good quote.
Good thing. But there is a way that their lives are stalled by circumstances that are not
generated from within the community and not easily addressed within the community.
And you know, I did a sort of longitudinal study of going back and finding these kids,
you know, who were in various ways, thriving in another ways stalled.
So shifting gears a little bit. Reflecting on this workshop,
but it was on your own research and not to generalise about interventions that are done for adolescents across different African countries.
But if there was one thing which you think is commonly missed from these interviews,
one thing you would really like to see changed for interventions in evidence or at least made more common.
What would what would that thing be as a site based on your own research based on reflections through this workshop?
I can start with you. I don't think it's one thing. I think it's a combination of a few things, and I don't think that they cost a lot of money.
I think that it is being very clear and very evidence-based about the combinations of interventions that you choose.
I think it is being clear about the need for interventions to be feasible and cost effective.
We often come up with these big, long lists that are not helpful or implementable on a scale.
And I think that it is having young people, ideally adolescents and not the kind of super duper professional advocate adolescents,
but adolescents who will be the people using those interventions to at the very least since check and tell people not to do something stupid.
Their income, something you would like to see change the more common, at least.
Well, for me on the African continent, like Lucy has said, these are not expensive.
These are things that I look at myself and the opportunities I had that I think have largely helped me to be what I am.
I had opportunities I had love, had security, I had friendships.
I had the opportunity to get a good education. And so that that has empowered me and I can make decisions and I'm a nobody can push me around.
I think it makes a lot of difference.
Adolescents and other sick children, adults, they need mentally healthy environments that will promote their emotional,
their well-being in all of this, like a it's a mental that would promote well-being.
What are those environments that are secure? You know, you can wake up in the morning and go to school.
You can move around secure environments.
They need friendships, they need schools that are supportive schools where they can learn in under different circumstances,
where they can be assured that they can have food, good meal.
The teachers understand adolescents and the way they think, and they encourage critical learning and empower them so that they can.
As adults go out and join the workforce and be productive members of society.
They need, you know, environments where they, you know, this water easy to get water, good drinking water.
There's health care. And even when they make mistakes, an adolescent who gets pregnant, there is not the end of the world and she knows that.
And he too, because I say they are both pregnant, even though one person carries the baby.
I think that's something that we need to emphasise. It's both an adolescent girls and a boy or whoever is the father.
They need that hope that I'll have. Even when I'm pregnant, I can go to school and continue my education.
I mean, we look around and these are things that these people need.
They need to be. They need, they're going to school. They don't want. I mean, they need decent clothes.
They can go to school with a girl has a menstrual period.
She needs sanitary pad. She just you don't have to use leaves or grab rags around the neighbourhood.
Basic things for for for a life of dignity and respect.
I think all of the above and I think that that that kind of I love one of the things in this conference and in modelling and could said,
just said is like the importance of love and not thinking that that's something extraneous to development projects to work to social reproduction.
That question of love, of feeling loved, of feeling cared for, a feeling creates a sense of security and capacity to weather difficult things to,
you know, and that is key to growing up in a healthy social capacitated way.
I would say as as a critic of so-called development projects, that one thing that is not so hard to do but seems impossible,
it's never done, is to have an intergenerational perspective on the project, to not have the timeline.
And you have this with research projects who but do not have the timeline.
This is a five year project, and if it displaces everyone from the possibility of staying in their community and finding work, that's not our problem.
That is your problem. You know, if what development does and this was to me,
the most crazy thing was make fewer children per capita go to school because the work
requirements of the cotton and groundnut cultivation and the diminishment of other resources,
you know, so it took longer to get firewood, took longer to graze animals, meant that children were going to school less frequently.
And you call that development, you know, as a certainly as an educator, I think education is a good part of, you know,
making a future that that when I spoke to these kind of NGOs and state development,
you know, they were like, Yeah, well, that's outside of our purview.
Well, why? Why can't you imagine a next generation within a project?
You don't have to be the funder of that, but you need to be thinking, what is the we can't just have the measurement, be cotton yields.
The measurement is where are our children going?
What happened was that the village itself took on, you know, did this self-help thing built a girls school,
hired women teach, you know, it was formidable transformation, but it shouldn't require such specialised.
It should be something that's thought of as part of an an intervention in any place.
So any last thoughts,
particularly for the African or African continent where we have a board in a huge adolescent population coming up in another few years,
we're actually going to be in terms of adolescent population almost as as, you know, the same population or, you know, as Asia.
So we are we have this huge young population untapped resource.
That population is Africa's wealth, and we need to harness that wealth for growth, for development, for peace.
All the things that the SDGs, you know, you know, growth, development, peace.
And one of the ways is we need to focus both on girls and boys.
And I would say equity. You look at a boy or look at boys and say, What resources do they need to be the very best they can?
And we look at girls, adolescent girls and do the same thing.
Give the boys and the girls because they are slight differences,
the resources they need to be the very best so that they can contribute and be part of the wealth of the African continent.
Thank you. And I want to completely compliment and add to that because what I think the most moving, painfully moving,
but extraordinary talks I ever heard in the university context was by Vali Soyinka, and he talked about the loss of a generation's creativity.
And he said this is the biggest loss, this destruction of the possibility of this whole strata of young people's futures.
And what they might have given to their communities, to Africa as a whole, to their nations, to the world is the biggest loss of all.
And I, you know, sometimes you cry and talks because you can't wait to get out of them.
But this one, I was just crying. It was so moving. And I and I think that's what's at stake in precisely what you said.
Yeah. Thanks very much for listening to this podcast.
Do you have a listen to the others in this series on understanding adolescents in African contexts?