NDEMO: Millennials have a place in Africa’s socio-cultural development

That the African socio-cultural development (sometimes referred to social change) is under severe disruption is in no doubt.

However, we rarely stop to think what sort of future we are likely to have, and the implications on our interactions and culture, although our future will be dictated by this nexus.

Socio-cultural development is defined as an idea that emphasises the interaction between developing people and the culture in which they live in. This notion also suggests that human learning is largely a social process.

Psychologists refer to this same concept as ”socio-cultural perspective.” Andrea McKay has made the following observation on this concept:

The sociocultural perspective is one approach to understanding why humans behave the way they do. The sociocultural perspective seeks to understand human behaviour and personality development by examining the rules of the social groups and subgroups in which the individual is a member. These rules are often unwritten guidelines that direct a person’s actions.

Since independence, we have had several largely unrecorded social change transitions. The little that is recorded is buried in books. Going forward, we can either manage this change or let it happen haphazardly with severe consequences.
Let me briefly deal with historical social changes and how they continue to impact our lives.

Immediately after independence, many people hoped to change their status by whatever means. Some sought for jobs in urban areas while educating their children with the hope of using them to change their social systems.
As a result, rural urban migration started in earnest. The emerging phenomenon of moving into urban areas caught the attention of then President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta when he launched the rudi mashamabani (back to the land) policy initiative which failed. There was no land for people to move to and where there was little, it wasn’t enough to sustain the livelihood. The rich had taken much of the land.

In my view, there have been four major social cultural shifts. The first shift was during the early colonial era and the advent of Christianity in the early 1900s, followed by late-colonial period (1930’s to late 1950’s). This change was characterised by hope that never materialised.

Then came the postcolonial period (between 1960’s and late 1980’s), which was culturally conservative, but welfarist in social-economic orientation. Where the state failed in provision of social services, citizens plugged the gap.

The fourth shift, which I call the ”millennial” as it characterised by those born in 1990’s and later, is beginning to shape up. It is far removed from the African social fabric. If the millenials fail to emulate the previous generation, a new phenomenon will arise – retirees on the streets, reminiscent of the emergence of street children that began to emerge in 1980s as the second generation failed.

African novelists, notably Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Weep Not Child, began to record social contradictions and social change as Africans encountered colonialism and Western civilisation.

Achebe achieved this by narrating the story of Okonkwo who hailed from a respected Igbo family in Umuofia. Okonkwo’s family are depicted as farmers. Life in their village had never changed for generation until the colonist arrived.
Njoroge, the protagonist in Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child goes through an experience almost similar to that of Okonkwo when his mother decides that her son will get the white man’s education and sends him to school, to his delight. Although Njoroge, like Okonkwo, works hard and pursues education all the way to England, he discovers things weren’t as he thought they would be.

For social change had begun in societies that were once a cohesive unit. Almost everyone felt ungrounded and betrayal abound. True, there were instances of courage and heroism but it was mostly an era of disappointment as the ”learned” devoured fruits of the independence that everyone had struggled for.

In spite of these changes, those who first moved into urban areas became the godfathers of many villagers moving into the cities. In acts of untold kindness, they provided accommodation and food to strangers from their villages, sometimes at the expense of their own children.

This period, lasting between 1963 to late 1970s, was the period of generosity. There were no street children then and everyone was their brother’s keeper.

The post-independence generation, although they loved their privacy, never abandoned community, although they occasionally dealt with it at an arm’s length.

They took care of their ailing parents and community social services. However, that goodwill is now on the wane as new, more individualistic and narcissistic generation emerges.

In my view, the millennial generation is not a lost cause. There is a silver lining in their clouded lifestyle. Their indifference to our destructive, ethnised social development could be an opportunity for creating national cohesion where one’s ethnic identity does not matter.

The incidence of intermarriage among this generation is by far the highest the country has witnessed. With diminishing mother tongue skills, most have been socialised in multicultural schools, churches and communities.

As urbanisation grows, more and more of this generation will become oblivious to ethnic differences. They will become Kenyans.

Our role is to encourage their march to homogeneity as therein lies our best hope of eliminating tribalism and building nations in a fractious Africa.

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s School of Business.@bantigito