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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E32-04. To panel E32.

Title of paper:

Author:

Erik van der Zanden (Leiden University).

Long abstract paper:
Economic opportunities during colonization led to an increased migration from villages to cities. In the last century, this move from rural areas to cities has been accompanied with a fast growing population within slums, leading to youth becoming the dominant group in African societies. In such overpopulated cities, youth are unable to find work and remain stuck in a situation of scarcity, called waithood.

As their desperation for escaping the waithood grows, opposition parties utilize the very frustration of these groups to pressure the government. Instead of working on solutions, governing powers often respond by using force to silence those opposition movements. With no options left, frustration has transformed into sudden violent uprisings and political instability, sometimes lingering for many years. Since colonial times, fast urbanization is perceived as a threat to peace in Africa, leading to a negative cycle of violence.

However, there might be an alternative. A Boserupian approach proposes that scarcity as a result of population growth forces people to innovate. Through innovation, youth may be able to escape their waithood. This decolonizing approach could lead to asking different questions about population growth.

Such moments of either violent instability or peaceful innovation lead to breaking points in history. What often follows is a set of institutions or repeating patterns of behaviour. These patterns determine historical trajectories to either more instability, or progress. In order to predict what political impact urbanization has on people who live in suburbs, one needs an inside-out perspective from these youth in waithood.

This paper is about peaceful political innovations of Ugandan youth in waithood in the slums of Kampala.

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