The more intensively I dealt with this understanding of childhood embodied in children’s lives, the more it became clear to me that children in the Global South are often met with incomprehension even by people and organizations who claim to help them. This incomprehension can even take on forms of enmity when, for example, children are persecuted and criminalized by the police at the insistence of international organizations simply because they help their mothers on the market (as I have seen in Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and India). It can also lead to the degradation of children when they are displayed on posters as suffering and helpless beings (without being asked) in a kind of pornography of misery to collect donations for charity projects. Such and other forms of disregard have led me over time to see it as an unspoken continuation of colonial subjugation and conquest.
Through my intensive engagement with the history of colonialism, with so-called postcolonial theory and with studies that made visible colonial stereotypes, for example in development policy and development education, I wanted to reflect on and express in a more comprehensive and structured way my experiences and unease have grown over the years. I also had to experience how even well-meaning people who wanted the best for the ‘poor little ones’ – children and families who did not meet their standards – secretly met them with contempt and arrogance, even if they did not express this openly or wanted to admit it. This book is the result of all this.
It was helpful for my enterprise that I have been able to participate in several meetings of the movements of working children and adolescents over the years and that I kept in constant contact with many active and former active children and their adult collaborators. I was also able to exchange ideas with experts of different ages, backgrounds and professions at various workshops and conferences in Latin America, Africa and India. In Germany and some other European countries, I found the opportunity to reflect on this experience in solidarity groups to support the rights of working children as well as with students and colleagues of the master’s programme ‘Childhood Studies and Children’s Rights’ at Free University Berlin (established in 2007) and continuing at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.
In particular, I would like to thank the following persons for their suggestions, stimulating conversations and critical remarks on individual parts of the manuscript: Rebecca Budde, Alejandro Cussiánovich, Elizabeth Dieckermann, Ina Gankam Tambo, Antonella Invernizzi, Andrea Kleeberg-Niepage, Bea Lundt, Urszula Markowska-Manista, Philip Meade, Brian Milne, Olga Nieuwenhuys, Iven Saadi, Giangi Schibotto, Peter Strack and Elisabeth Weller. Rebecca Budde and Courtney O’Connor in particular supported me in the elaboration of my thoughts in the English language. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Sarah Bird of Policy Press for their critical comments on the book project and their suggestions for its revision.
Manfred Liebel
Berlin, September 2019
It is one of the self-comprehensions of today’s socio-scientific childhood research that children and childhoods cannot be considered as natural phenomena, but are shaped by the social conditions, social relations and cultural contexts they are part of. Moreover, no talk about children and childhood is ever perfectly matched to reality – it is always filtered through the visions and values of those who talk and write about children and childhood. In this book, children are seen as actors who are never unaffected and uninfluenced by predetermined social structures and cultural patterns, but who can nevertheless influence, shape and thus also modify these structures and patterns. This also applies to the development and appearance of what we call childhood. That is why it is important to emphasize that there is not only one childhood, but always different childhoods, be it with regard to the history, to each individual life course, or to different societies and cultures. In the context of the presentation of children and childhoods in this book, I aim to express children’s perceptions and actions.
Why is this book devoted to childhoods in the postcolonial context, and what do I mean by that? The European colonialization of other continents, which has been going on since the 15th century, still has consequences for the power structures of today’s world and people’s ways of thinking in different parts of the world. These are postcolonial in the double sense that they follow the colonial epoch in time and challenge criticism of the aftermath of colonialization. The term postcolonial is thus used to criticize the existing unequal global power structures that are remainders of colonialism, and thus can also be described as neo-colonial. When I speak of childhoods in the postcolonial context or postcolonial childhoods, I want to express that even today’s childhoods, and in reflections, talk and writings about them, the colonialization of ‘alien’ parts of the earth continues to affect them and therefore must be critically examined. In doing so, I will also show that the dominant understanding of childhood in Europe is closely interwoven with the process of colonialization.
One aspect of reflecting about postcolonial childhoods is that the people living in Europe (as involuntary descendants of the colonial powers) know little about children and childhoods outside Europe and North America. One reason for this is that they have largely been seen in the light of a ‘“Western” narrative of modernization’ (Morrison, 2012: 3). The history of childhood in non-Western regions has been ignored for a long time or has been viewed in a very one-sided light due to existing stereotypes about childhood. In the media, but also in scientific representations, for example, children in Africa are almost exclusively regarded as AIDS orphans, street children, child soldiers or trafficked girls, often portrayed as helpless and needy victims in exceptional circumstances. They do not seem to have a ‘normal’ life or characteristics comparable to the lives of ‘our’ children. Their lives are being degraded, and they are also pushed to the brink of the world, made ‘children out of place’ (Connolly and Ennew, 1996; Invernizzi et al, 2017). On the contrary, I want to put these children, who represent the large and growing majority of children on earth, in the centre of this book and express their lives in their many facets.
Childhood research to date and the categories developed by it are largely based on children and childhood in the Global North. The categories are occasionally subjected to an ideological-critical deconstruction in which their role of legitimization is made visible (see, for example, James et al, 1998; Prout, 2005). In so far as childhood research refers to children and childhood in the Global South, it is usually restricted to ethnographic descriptions without questioning the categories themselves and without taking the postcolonial power constellation into consideration. In this book, which I also see as a contribution to the decolonization of research on childhood and children’s rights, I will show how this constellation affects children in the former colonial territories as well as how they are perceived and dealt with.
A postcolonial constellation to me is an unequal material and ideological or epistemic power relationship that leaves little space for childhoods that do not correspond to the pattern of childhood that dominates the Global North. On the material level, the life of most children in the Global South, or the former colonial territories, is determined by the fact that they are cut off from vital resources and have to grow up under precarious conditions. These conditions result from the continuing economic and political dominance of the Global North and corresponding dependencies, disadvantages and multiple (mostly racist) discrimination. On the epistemological level, the lifeforms of childhood are made invisible, based on or influenced by inherited cultural traditions that appear to be unfathomable. This is all the more so since, in the dominant discourses, these modes of life are not valued as being childhood, children are at best mocked and bemused, sometimes feared, and labelled as ‘children without childhood’. However, the postcolonial exercise of power does not merely replace the ‘old’ childhood with a ‘new’ childhood, but rather creates