Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the predicament of a Namibian youth elite in their effort to become modern and cosmopolitan individuals. I examine the emergence of this new flexible subject in the context of recent economic changes and the reconfiguration of morality and kinship in post-apartheid Namibia.

Paper long abstract:

Members of a youth elite in Namibia conceptualise the predicament of becoming a cosmopolitan and modern individual, whilst simultaneously striving to emerge as a moral being within the realm of their matri-kin with the term "Balance". This term borrowed from a popular Namibian tune, encapsulates the existential dimension of balancing their existences, as they say, between their cosmopolitans aspirations and their efforts to assist their kin and thus contribute to the making, re-making and un-making of a moral community whose influence stretches in a continuum across the rural and urban divide. Furthermore this term points to the emergence of a new and flexible subject in the context of wider socio-economic transformations in Namibia and Southern Africa. Following a recent academic debate on post-apartheid Namibian society, I argue, how the recent economic growth in Namibia, has seen the consolidation of new racial and social inequalities, alongside the old ones, and the reconfiguration of sociality through increasingly commoditised practices, which produces new regimes of exclusion, privilege and authority. These demand the emergence of a flexible subject capable to respond to these new socio-economic challenges, whilst at the same time maintaining morality as the core of ones existence. I will here present my argument through the ethnographic example of a youth elite wedding, and highlight the interplay between these new socio-economic transformation, the youthful cosmopolitan aspirations and the complex reconfiguration of morality and kinship in post-apartheid Namibia.