Over the past two decades, metaphors of stasis, such as “waithood”, “being stuck”, or “waiting”, have been mobilized to describe the conditions of prolonged youth that many Africans experience in the face of economic instability. As urban centers across the continent grow with youthful populations that cannot be absorbed by job markets, there is a lingering sense that young Africans must put their futures on hold. Yet the overwhelming attention to deferred futures often leaves underexplored, what lives these young people make in the present. Residents in Lagos – Nigeria’s capital – constantly navigate urban precarities to constitute alternative visions and practices of space, intimacy, and belonging in the growing absence of the more normative routes to stability. Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research, this talk examines youth subjectivity in the contemporary urban landscape of Lagos as emergent through everyday practices of negotiating space and re-constituting intimacy. It follows scenes of youth sociality on a street bar, university campus, and church, to discuss how young Lagosians inhabit the tight and provisional infrastructures of the city to make a life. By tracing the question of “intimacy” through these seemingly contradictory but co-eval sites, I ask, what intimate encounters and practices emerge under the conditions of spatial tightness and provisionality, and how do these intersect with more normative imaginaries of intimate life? How do young Lagosians use the body to make stable that which is uncertain and how do these bodily/intimate practices elicit discourses about youth as a ‘problem-category’. The talk argues that while practices of making space on a material and affective level ensure new pathways to intimacy, they also become the very processes by which youth is recognized and disciplined by the state. 
 

Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju is a doctoral student in the Department of African and African American Studies with a primary field in Anthropology.  She did her undergraduate degree in German and French at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and her Masters in African Studies at Cambridge University.
Her research interests are around contemporary urban youth cultures and subcultures in Nigeria with specific attention to themes of resistance, textuality, embodiment, and intimacy.  She has done research around the paradoxes of compliance and resistance in West Africa popular music as well as figurations of the queer self in contemporary Nigerian youth texts in which she examines how temporal texts and everyday performances of the body (pointedly, the young body) intimately and/or precariously relate with broader institutions of power such as the State, religion, and the economy.
Also interested in literature, Diekara writes fiction and works (now remotely) as an organiser for the Cambridge University African Literature Book Club, run by the Center of African Studies, Cambridge.