This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.

The study of childhood has been dominated by the field of psychology but a robust tradition in anthropology, dating at least to Mead’s (1928/1961) Coming of Age in Samoa, calls attention to the culture-bound flaw in psychology. Mead’s work undermined the claim by psychologist G. Stanley Hall that stress was inevitably part of adolescence. Less well known was Malinowski’s earlier critique of Freud’s Oedipal theory based on fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (Malinowski 1927/2012). Universal stage theories of cognitive development, such as that of Jean Piaget, met a similar fate when cross-cultural comparative studies demonstrated profound and unpredicted influences of culture and school attendance (Greenfield 1966; Lancy and Strathern 1981; Lancy 1983). Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1984) analysis of adult–child language interaction also showed that ethnographic studies in non-Western societies could be used to “de-universalize” claims made in mainstream developmental psychology. Bob LeVine has taken on one of psychology’s most sacred cows, mother–infant attachment (see also Scheper-Hughes 1987a).

“Change Agents: Youths and Politics” examines the contribution of youths, active and otherwise, to Nigerian politics, and eventually to the development of its society as young people are variously described as strong, virile, and teachable, and generally have longer lifespans. However, the increase in unemployment, poverty, lack of access to education and health facilities etc., are factors that suppresses the productivity of the Nigerian youths. These factors also endanger the progress and peace of the nation in general, as the burgeoning rise in the number of youths unengaged is a threat to the stability and progress of the nation. Hence, structured care and training for the young yields profit in the form of self-actualization for the individual, and growth and stability for the family unit and the country. When youths are strengthened with the necessary education, healthcare, and other interventions for optimal growth, the nation is on a path to collective development. Also, this discourse examines the (paradoxical) relation of the youths to the development of the nation: how the meaningful involvement of the youth with Nigerian politics is hindered, denied, or overlooked; how Nigerian youths are exploited as mechanisms by the elites to perpetrate political violence; and how government policies continue to result in political apathy among the youths despite being the larger percentage of the nation’s population.