Tanzania’s ‘new generation’:

Age is commonly treated in social research as an independent variable. But once we categorize age, particularly in terms of generations, we appear to be dealing with a construct. Cultural convention distinguishes young and old. Both members and non-members of an age cohort (re)produce a ‘generation’: they determine who belongs to it, what an older or younger generation means in terms of social status, power, values and so on, and the significance, if any, of generations in that society. This chapter considers the special case of people consciously redefining the construct and pursuing an active version of generation. Ethnicity and women’s emancipation are two examples in which one may assert one’s rights by attributing group-like features to one category of independent variable (respectively descent and gender). Given these two classic examples, can we not imagine the same thing happening with a third primary variable, age categorized in terms of generation? This chapter illustrates how young Tanzanians indeed use age i