2024-02-04 15:33:54
In an era of rising inequalities, accounting for forms of social mobility is a crucial issue for contemporary societies.
In Africa, societies today are largely marked both by their youth and by high levels of inequality. Across the continent, the social and economic frustrations of young people are regularly highlighted as important drivers of socio-political dynamics, whether they are social movements, popular uprisings or citizens’ support for coup d’états. State.
However, interpreting the forms and contours of social mobilities to which African youth can aspire requires understanding the continent’s societies as social spaces structured by different intertwined systems of inequality.
The differences in conditions within a plural youth are obviously anchored in inequalities of economic resources, but also cultural and social. These inequalities are also intertwined with other qualities of individuals, such as their gender identity, a major division of social spaces here as elsewhere, or their regional identity – we know the salience in many African contexts of the ethno-regional fact.
Inevitably intertwined, these different resources and social qualities structure or condition what we can designate as “life chances”, according to Max Weber’s formula, that is to say the opportunities to access goods and forms desirable lifestyles in a given society.
Social spaces on the move
A first difficulty in thinking regarding African social mobility arises from the fact that the continent’s societies are transforming rapidly today. Thus, certain forms of intergenerational mobility only accompany more global transformations.
For example, the rise in educational level from one generation to the next, regularly observed across the continent, is not necessarily synonymous with upward family trajectories. It must be contextualized in relation to the general rise in the level of education on the continent. Having obtained the baccalaureate or its equivalent in the 1970s or in the 2020s does not have the same social meaning and does not translate in the same way in level and lifestyle. Certain trajectories that may initially appear as forms of social reproduction are therefore only partly so.
We find a similar phenomenon in the situation of many young African farmers. Indeed, today they are engaged in agriculture in societies generally marked by a rural exodus and a social downgrading of farmers. Such dynamics have been observable across the continent for several decades. It now fundamentally affects the social value and meaning of the peasant condition: beneath reproduction can be a form of downgrading.
Village of Mabanda, Burundi, May 10, 2022. For many African farmers, doing the same job as their parents is now a form of social downgrading. R. Bociaga/Shutterstock
Understanding contemporary social mobility therefore requires questioning both the evolution of living conditions and lifestyles, but also their meaning and the forms of social recognition that may or may not be attached to social positions. – hence the notion of social im/mobility, proposed to evoke such paradoxical dynamics where social reproduction and mobility intertwine.
“Lateral” or “transversal” mobility
In Benin, many “motorcycle taxi” drivers come from rural areas, and move between town and countryside, returning at regular intervals to their village of origin, where their wife(s) and children remain. Often sharing cramped and basic accommodation with several people during their stays in the city, they thus maximize their possibilities of saving and investing in their future projects.
Other young rural people, fewer of whom than in the city complete their schooling, will also try the urban adventure, and become workers, or even resellers of goods purchased on credit, hoping to see their businesses progress little by little.
Thus, many men and women gradually free themselves from the peasant condition, and move from a situation of rural poverty to the working-class neighborhoods of a large city on the continent. There, some will certainly manage to rise in the social space by taking advantage of recognized professional skills. But for a clear majority, it will be small businesses or low-skilled jobs in the urban precariat, in the uncertainty of the so-called “informal” economy, or in the new “special economic zones” at the heart of the industrialization strategies of the continent.
Such shifts in social space cannot always be reduced to “gains” or “losses” on a one-dimensional social scale. They should rather be understood as “lateral” movements between working-class, rural and urban environments, or “transversal”, when they are accompanied by a slight social ascension.
Indeed, urban growth and the reduction in the share of the active population in agriculture, attested across the continent beyond the diversity of national situations, obviously correspond to a major social dynamic, the cultural implications of which go well beyond the professional structure, because urbanization profoundly affects lifestyles.
However, if we consider social mobility as an alteration of “life chances”, when poorly educated individuals from the countryside join the poor layers of (peri-) urban society, this does not fundamentally modify their living conditions. existence, nor their “chances” to accumulate wealth or access sufficient income.
Ajegunle City, Lagos, Nigeria, 22 mars 2018.
Tayvay/Shutterstock
Examples of this type of situation abound. In Kinshasa, precarious employees in the informal economy live on meager incomes and often in extremely precarious conditions which ultimately prove to be little different from those in rural areas which they have sometimes left to try their luck in the city.
Access to the city often requires mobilizing more or less distant family relationships, which will provide the starting point for a network of relationships to be reconstructed: economic resources and “social capital” are often closely intertwined in the trajectories. of social mobility between city and countryside.
But ultimately, the urban working classes are exposed in many cases to comparable forms of uncertainty regarding their social destiny as their rural equivalents. Thus, many social mobilities in the lower regions of the social space are in fact short, more or less “lateral” movements, which see individuals change sector of activity and environment, without being fundamentally affected their “life chances”.
The education in question
At the heart of many upward social trajectories – especially male ones – in the second part of the 20th century, education is still today capable of producing effects of upward social mobility, although in a less immediate manner than a few decades ago. .
In Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other possible examples, access to private or public salaried employment is difficult to achieve without relying on relationships: promoting educational qualifications also requires a certain social capital.
Apple harvest for the European market in South Africa. Peter Titmuss/Shutterstock
On farms in northern South Africa, young Zimbabwean university graduates pick fruit alongside older, established migrants who are permanent workers on the same farms. Their university qualifications do not seem to have allowed them stable professional integration into Zimbabwean society, and their future social trajectory remains undecided.
However, education remains massively invested across the continent. And the level of school and university qualifications rises regularly over time in all middle strata of the population, these famous African “middle classes” whose advent is celebrated by international institutions, but whose heterogeneity remains considerable. , and the uncertain contours.
That said, various studies carried out in West and Central Africa have shown that the possession of school qualifications, and even more so university qualifications, remains an important vector of social stratification across the continent. But the link between education and upward social mobility seems to have weakened. To put it another way, education is no longer as powerful a social elevator today as in the decades following independence.
In addition, the massive development, over the last decades, of a private education sector has gradually introduced an economic stratification of the educational offer, with private schools often offering training more popular with the middle and upper strata of the population. population.
At the university level, the cost of public training has gradually increased in parallel with the development of private provision. New economic barriers to access to higher education have been introduced. Thus, students from modest origins or from rural areas now face not only a cultural distance from higher education, but also economic obstacles to pursuing their studies.
Complex mobility
The figure of the “self-made” entrepreneur haunts discussions on social mobility, in Africa and beyond. However, if dazzling social climbs do indeed exist, most mobility in the space of social positions are short trips, shaped by the different economic and social resources of individuals with very different living conditions, can assemble.
From Niger and Nigeria to Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa, the research gathered in the volume Social Im/mobilities in Africa that I had the opportunity to direct essentially document uncertain and unstable trajectories of social mobility, which only rarely subvert the significant gaps in condition and status which today leave their mark on the dynamics of African societies .
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