Overview

This book contributes to an international literature on childhood by providing a variety of lenses through which we can further explore children's reflections about the worlds they inhabit. Through documentation of the reflections of life in a temporary relocation camp of six children, the research findings show the slippages in descriptions and categories of children and childhood that are further impacted by the violent over-determining histories and current structures of their parents' experiences under apartheid's divisive laws. In this way, the book offers testament to the lasting impact apartheid has left on South Africa's children. The stories explored are thematically organised according to a creative methodology implanted as part of the data gathering design. Through careful analysis of the participatory model chosen, insights into the constructions of children and childhood has been essential in generating research and policy strategies that have positioned children as agential members of society, interacting and reconstructing sociocultural and political locations. The stories of these six children offer testament to a fluidity of identifications and responsibilities that criss-cross notions of what it is to be a child, youth or adult in sites of frequent forced mobility.

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9781839982668

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Reviews

“This book is a welcome and important addition to the growing field of anthropologies of childhood in southern Africa.  What is striking about this text is the engagement at all times with questions of place, and centrally with the instability of place in fractured and precarious childhoods.  There is also a remarkable affective engagement – Prah resists implicit calls to spurious objectivity, and instead shows through her work that the best social science is the product of both head and heart.  This book should be of interest and great use not just to anthropologists but also to anyone interested in what childhood is and means in contemporary South Africa.” — Leslie Swartz, Professor of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Editor in Chief of South African Journal of Science “This book adds to the existing scholarship on the anthropology of children in Africa. It stands out, uniquely from the pack, in its methodological and theoretical formulations. It is provocative and so-phisticated, thus opening up previously uncharted paths in the scholarship on childhood, urban vio-lence, housing, and social justice.” — Saheed Aderinto, editor of Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories

Author Information

Efua Tembisa Prah is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research reflects her interests in anthropological theorisations in intercontinental African migration politics, refugee studies, adolescent and childhood studies, and studies of the embodiment of sexuality, pregnancy, and birthing.

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