This is a review of Stuck – Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for
Adulthood by Marc Sommers. Published
by the University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Stuck is an
unusual and hauntingly sad book. It is a solidly researched sociological study
of what youth in today’s Rwanda see as their prospects. Most of the youth, especially those from the
overwhelmingly poor majority, find themselves caught in the transition zone of
life between childhood and adulthood. They are not able to become men or women
on account of a pernicious combination of culture, economics and government
policy.
To become an adult in Rwanda requires that a male build a
house, have some sort of income, marry in a publically acceptable fashion and
have children. For a female, she must properly marry and bear children. It sounds simple, but isn’t. Rural youth have limited opportunities for
earning money, so putting aside even a meager amount to buy roof tiles is
difficult. Furthermore, government
policy to restrict new housing to planned villages severely thwarts ambitions
because the requirements for those locations are too onerous. Rather than use a
family farm, one must buy a plot and build a house much larger than a poor man
can afford. Obviously if men cannot meet
the cultural requirement for marriage, then women too are stuck. There is no
one to marry. Additionally, females are constrained by law that prohibits
marriage before age 21 and, culturally by age 25 or so, females are considered
too old.
One consequence of the failure to attain adulthood in rural
areas is flight to the city. Those
interviewed called this “escaping.”
There youth become lost in the urban milieu, still unable to earn much
money, but freed partially from their “stuckness” on their home hillside. Life in the city comes down to scrounging one
meal a day, a few pennies for local brew and visiting a prostitute. Female options are fewer. A percentage of them soon resort to
prostitution. Government housing
policies also impact on urban youth as tracts of shanty towns are leveled for
modern housing for richer folks. The
policy to ban informal trading also hinders youths’ ability to earn money.
For the poor majority education was not a viable option.
Even though Rwanda laudably promotes universal primary education, few of the
four hundred persons interviewed had completed primary school. Most dropped out
to “dig,” i.e. perform field labor, in order to begin saving for a house. Those bottom class folks saw kids who
completed school and went on to secondary school (less than 10 percent) as a
privileged class apart.
A preponderance of the youth interviewed reported they had
no prospects, few dreams, and no abilities to change their fate. They were not only
stuck in a netherworld where they could never attain adulthood and acceptance
in society, but were perpetually doomed to exist on the margins of society and
the fringes of a modern economy.
Most of the government officials interviewed for the book
agreed with those observations. They
know that the crisis has already arrived and government policies exacerbate the
problems rather than help solve them. The problem arises in that central
government authoritarianism prevails and policies of social engineering
presently underway such as the requirement to create villages in order to free
up agricultural land are set in stone. One hope is that this book will engender
policy discourse and conversations that might result in modifications in
national policies that will help rather than hinder youth aspirations.
