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“Youth is just a word” said the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, raising a polemic and, consequently, a heated discussion in academic and intellectual circles around the idea of youth. In fact, “youth” is a term embracing everything, and that enables its easy appropriation.

I recall the words so vividly: “You are a mafikozolo – the just arrived”! What did I know about women’s human rights? What did I know about human rights broadly? Who did I think I was to come into an already defined space and attempt a transformation of how things were done? Young “girls” were supposed to know their place and let adults make the decisions. I was just a “youth” after all.

This Issue of BUWA! interrogates – from a feminist perspective – the current narratives on youth on the African continent. Understood in this context as a series or groups of stories that are told by individuals and groups as part of a causal set of events,1 narratives play a significant role in shaping the politics of the day in any given society.