Playing, Working, and Learning in Flux: Perspectives from African Post-forager Childhoods

This chapter focuses on the relation between play, work and learning among San and Hadza post-forager children in Southern and East Africa. Pre-school and non-school attending San and Hadza children structure their daily lives based on interest and motivation and spend long periods of unsupervised time playing mostly non-competitive games and imitating adult behavior and activities. This plays an instrumental role for the learning of a wide range of social, ecological and subsistence knowledge. Since the San and the Hadza are extremely socioeconomically marginalized in their respective countries, their approaches to work and leisure are largely perceived in negative and deficient terms by neighboring groups and state institutions. Our goal with this chapter is twofold. First, we will explore the meaning of the term leisure in the context of (post-forager) San and Hadza children. Then we will examine how the term differs from dominant understandings of it and how it relates to ‘legitimate’ notions of work and learning. At the end, we will discuss the implications of these differences in the context of a rapidly changing world and San and Hadza children’s increased participation in school.