Globalization: Adolescent Experience in Kenya
BY PAULINE E. GINSBERG
In systematic study of the effects of globalization on adolescents outside Western Europe and North America, teens are depicted as passive recipients of changes in worldwide socio-political and economic events driven by the behavior of the great economic, technological, and political powerhouses of the United States, the European Community, and technologically advanced Asian nations.
Gielen and Chumachenko used world demographic and economic data to identify twenty trends characterizing “the global transformation of childhood in our times.” At a macro system level, these trends affect children and adolescents as entire societies move from predominantly local agrarian economies to global technological ones. Five trends specifically impinge upon adolescents: prolonging the transition to adulthood, orienting away from adult authority towards adolescent subcultures, searching for information and meaning in the mass media rather than in the community, preparing for undefined social roles in a fluctuating society, and changing parental expectations from an economic to a socio-emotional emphasis. A focused look at mass media’s role may provide sufficient evidence supporting my argument that youth are not passive recipients of globalization’s effects, but active seekers accelerating the globalization process.
Cultural diffusion is not a new phenomenon and young people have typically been early adopters. In prior centuries, travel or the chance appearance of travelers, traders and missionaries drove the process; today, individuals with access to media technology actively experience other cultures without ever leaving home. Adolescents are not the authors of this technology, nor its producers and primary marketers. What they experience via the media is not of their making, but adolescents’ eager embrace of what they find is intentional and strongly related to characteristics of the adolescent life stage. Nowhere is this more apparent than in developing regions such as Kenya.
BIOLOGICAL MATURATION AND GLOBAL MEDIA
Adolescence is the time between the onset of puberty and cessation of growth. In the West, a secular trend toward earlier puberty reduced the average age of menarche from approximately 16 to 12 ½ over the last 150 years. Initially attributed to improved diet, currently stress and obesity are also implicated. Although longitudinal data are not available for Kenya, Eveleth and Tanner found the average age of menarche in other African nations to range from 13 (Mozambique) to 17 (Rwandan Hutu). Using data collected between 1963 and 1972, they predicted that Africa would follow or surpass the trend exhibited by industrialized nations. In 2002, University of Nairobi adolescent development students reported 12 as the average age of menarche among Kenya’s urban girls, thus lending support to the hypothesis. Changes in diet, body weight and stress are also apparent.
Although trade and cultural diffusion long ago made British afternoon tea a habit and the new-world crops of maize, potatoes and tomatoes traditional staples, most food was boiled or grilled, served with a variety of greens, tropical fruits, and relatively small amounts of meat, poultry, eggs, or fish. Sweets and fried foods were a rarity. Slender bodies were the norm. Excess weight implied wealth and health, particularly after identification of HIV/AIDS — “ukimwe” in Swahili, “slim” in English — during the 1980s.
Concurrent with access to world media (including advertising), pressure from the WTO, IMF, and World Bank forced Kenya to open her doors to trade. Now, urban streets feature fast food and Nairobi’s modern supermarkets and shopping malls offer vast choices. Malls teem with adolescent shoppers, video arcade patrons, and food court customers.
The shopping mall where one can consume novel foods high in calories, fats, and sugars, meet one’s peers, and pursue adventure in the video-arcade to some extent fulfills the social and biological functions of traditional hunting, gathering, and farming activities for increasingly urbanized youth. It provides the novelty and excitement adolescents crave and may, in fact, need if they are to venture into productive adulthood. But it provides these at a cost: less exercise, added body weight, higher fat to muscle ratio, and heightened stress — all implicated in early puberty.
Media designed to appeal to adolescents of the West depicts teens, internationally known athletes, and performers involved in activities Kenyan teens choose to emulate. It is replete with advertising for food and for stylish clothing, exercise and weight loss aids, and beauty products. Overweight is on the increase in Kenya and at odds with the slender ideal body type appearing in the media. Eating disorders, heretofore thought absent in less developed areas with periods of food insecurity, are emerging. Teens are dieting. Some engage in the extreme practices of anorexia and bulimia. They find not only diet groups, but an international community of anorexics on the internet.
Although the research marker for stress in most American research regarding early menarche is parental divorce, there is no logical reason why anxiety regarding whether one measures up to a media supported body-ideal might not also be a contributing stressor and, thus, a promoter of early puberty.
COGNITIVE MATURATION AND GLOBAL MEDIA
Adolescent thought processes also interact with media accessibility and usage in Kenya. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology confirms the observational research of Piaget and others regarding qualitative changes in thought processes that take place in the transition from childhood to adolescence. Among them is the ability to think abstractly, imagine things as they are not, use logic, make and carry out plans, look at things from varied perspectives, and be aware of one’s own thought processes. Yet only in young adulthood are people able to temper impulse with knowledge born of skepticism and practical experience, temper idealism with pragmatism, and understand the complex interaction of objective fact and subjective emotion.
With the ability to think more complexly comes the pleasure in doing so. Learning philosophy and algebra, writing poetry, solving practical problems of animal husbandry, farming and housekeeping tend to make elders proud and happy. Questioning myth, religion, and political systems and measuring parents, elders, and teachers against an ideal are less welcome and not traditionally tolerated. In a global society, the “information highway” stretches far and wide for anyone with internet access. In Kenya, it is most often the young who are both literate and computer savvy. The internet provides them a forum to explore ideals, make comparisons, ask questions, and challenge the status quo while excluding parents, grandparents and local sources of authority from the discourse. At the same time, global input, often from poorly identified sources, is accepted, enhancing global acculturation of youth while contributing to local deculturation.
SOCIAL MATURATION AND GLOBAL MEDIA
The phenomenon in which adolescents, by means of the internet, create a society of peers resembles old forms of peer group socialization. Many of Kenya’s pre-colonial societies incorporated gender segregated group initiation ceremonies for males, females, or both. These involved age-based cohorts subjected to experiences that built group loyalty and solidarity. As the intellectual and social elite began attending secondary boarding schools during the colonial era, the school experience served the same function; teens in boarding schools were isolated from family and community for months at a time and subjected to rigorous, often punishing educational and social regimes. Those able to endure until graduation did so by forming cohesive units that, in some cases, crossed ethnic barriers and formed the basis of government and civil society at independence.
Currently, although there are large regional differences in enrollment, the number of secondary schools and students has increased dramatically. Not all are boarding schools, but those that are function in much the same way as in the colonial period. At the same time, enterprising literate individuals who are unable to access formal secondary education, but have a small income are able to use computers in the internet cafes now present even in small towns. They too have access to the world. Moreover, online they need not disclose their educational status or ethnicity. This may eventually serve to blur class and ethnic lines.
Providing ability to enhance connections among peers by expanding shared experience even when separated by geographic and social boundaries, media is more likely to undermine than enhance shared experience within families. Education of any kind, including that received through the media, separates young people from less educated elders and exposes youth to a greater variety of career and lifestyle opportunities than their parents and grandparents might imagine. Alternatives to nomadic herding, to subsistence agriculture, to polygyny, to arranged marriages, to extended family life rooted in a rural compound, to traditional celebrations and rites of passage create emotional distance, undermine the long awaited authority of elders, and, while most often a source of excitement to the idealistic young person looking forward, are more likely to bring to the local community a sense of loss, albeit often mixed with a sense of pride. New stories of bridging the now-widening generation gap remain to be told.
Pauline Ginsberg (pginsbe@utica.edu) is professor of psychology at Utica College (http://www.utica.edu) and a senior visiting research fellow at the Center for Global Studies. References and recognitions were deleted due to space, but are available from the author.
