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“Village Life is Better Than Town Life:” Migration, Identity, and Development in the Lives of Ugandan Child Citizens

Kristen E. Cheney, University of California, Santa Cruz
kcheney@ucsc.edu

Much has been written about rural migration to urban areas in Africa, and of young people’s aspirations toward the city. Scholars have paid little attention, however, to urban children’s longing for the rural, which they often see as integral to both their pasts and their futures. This paper therefore contextualizes Ugandan urban-rural relations through urban children’s knowledge, imaginations, and experiences, which are affected by the present socio-historic moment in Uganda. Based on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork with children in Kampala, Uganda, this work explores the ways children envision their connections to their country through geographically located but imaginatively shifting identities. It demonstrates that urban schoolchildren, influenced by urban-rural migration history, changing notions of family and kinship, and the national government’s prolific development-through-education campaign, are coming to imagine ‘the village’ both as an integral space of ethnic identity origination and as a location for fulfillment of national citizenship through development trajectories. Winner of the 2004 African Studies Association Graduate Student Paper Prize, this case study raises important new theoretical questions about identity formation, locality, and nationalism for young Africans.