DECOLONIZING CHILDHOODS
From Exclusion to Dignity
Manfred Liebel
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by
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ISBN 978-1-4473-5641-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4473-5640-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4473-5643-1 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4473-5642-4 (ePdf)
The right of Manfred Liebel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I How to understand childhoods in the postcolonial context
1Childhoods from postcolonial perspectives
2Colonialism and the colonization of childhoods
3Postcolonial theories from the Global South
Part II Children under colonial and postcolonial rule
4State violence against children in British Empire and former settler colonies
5Racist civilization of children in Latin America
6Pitfalls of postcolonial education and child policies in Africa
Part III Children’s rights and the decolonization of childhoods
7Postcolonial dilemmas of children’s rights
8Beyond paternalism: Plea for the de-paternalization of children’s protection and participation
9Children’s movements as citizenship from below
Epilogue: Childhoods and children’s rights beyond postcolonial paternalism
References
Index
The idea for the book arose from my many years of experience and studies with children in Latin America and Africa. My first significant experience was in the 1980s in a camp of Salvadorian refugees in Honduras and in a rural region of Nicaragua, where a cruel civil war was underway. There I experienced children who had to endure unimaginable suffering and fought for their survival in a way that astonished me, often on their own. These experiences turned a lot of what I thought I knew about children upside down. My thoughts about children of the Global South, especially those living in extreme poverty, were soon put to the test again, when I found an opportunity to volunteer for a ‘social brigade’ (as it was then called) to accompany children on the streets and markets of the Nicaraguan capital Managua (and other cities in the country). Here the children provided for their livelihoods and in some cases also for their families. I kept wondering where these children found the strength to cope with such oppressive living conditions without losing courage and even humour.
I began to understand that the children often drew their strength from taking care of themselves and others and taking responsibility, and – which I consider decisive – found recognition in their environment. Observing that the children often supported each other, together with my colleagues who tried to support the children, we came up with the idea of promoting the children’s self-organization. I was familiar with this idea from the social movements of school and university students and young workers, who have rebelled in Germany and other countries since the late 1960s against authoritarian control and fought for a freer and self-determined life. Nevertheless, the idea of self-organization gained a new meaning in many respects in view of the living conditions of the children I was dealing with. It was not only about freedom and self-determination, but also, to a much greater extent, about social equality and justice. In Nicaragua and – as I have experienced since the 1990s – in other regions of the Global South, the idea of self-organization manifested itself in various social movements of young people against discrimination, disregard, poverty, exploitation and war and for a peaceful and secure life in which their human dignity is protected. Increasingly, the idea of children’s rights, understood as the human rights of children, was also approached.
One of the social movements that influenced my thinking about children and childhoods to a particular degree is that of working children and adolescents, which began in Latin America, starting from Peru in the late 1970s, and appeared in Africa and Asia from the early 1990s. This movement, which has different local characteristics, shows an understanding of childhood that contradicts the concept of childhood that emerged in modern Europe in many respects. It is characterized by the fact that children do not live in a sphere separated from the world of adults, but want to participate in society as a whole and exert an influence on it. According to this understanding, children do not stop being children (for example, when they work or take joint responsibility in society), but it no longer excludes children from society and does not make them