From Kenya to Madagascar, Senegal to Cameroon, Tanzania to Nigeria, Morocco to Mozambique. A wave of protests led by young people under the age of 30 known as “Generación Z” is spreading across Africa and seems unstoppable. They occupy streets and public spaces, confront the forces of order, and restore elections and the Tumbang government. Some countries face leaders who remain in power forever and make mistakes in voting, while others struggle with expensive living, lack of jobs, and cuts to water and electricity. They organize as horizontal movements on social networks. They want new references and allies, not promises, and are jumping at the seams of old pacts that serve priests and abusers, but this African Gen Z is smothering ancient pacts in its haste as free from all obligations.
As if to symbolize what is happening, three presidents on the African continent were re-elected in just one week in October. El Malfileño Alassane Ouattara, 83, in his fourth term as president, and Tanzanian Samia Suluhu Hassan, 65, head a party that has been in power since 1977.
In all three countries, major opposition leaders are free to seek re-election after being barred from office by imprisonment, sentencing or judicial separation. This process is not new, but it is not easy to digest. Protests have particularly intensified the electoral process in Tanzania, which is aware of the high number of deaths caused by police violence.
Weeks earlier, Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina left the country after a month of protests by pirate flag-throwing youths wearing cartoon paja sombreros. one piece. At the same time, the youth of Generación Z challenged Morocco’s normal stability by demanding more funding for hospitals and schools rather than building soccer stadiums.
In Kenya last year, an attempt to raise taxes sparked demonstrations in which parliament was set on fire and was repressed with mass violence, while in Senegal, thousands of young people in 2021 unleashed anger at a government that used justice to attack opposition leader Ousmane Sonko and encourage him to turn to elections from his street supporters. Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, and Togo have also recently experienced protests, all with one thing in common: young people.
reparations and justice
Abdurrahman Sek, a Senegalese anthropologist and historian, asserts that “when there is no political utopia, they become rebellious. Young people do not want democracy, they want reparations and justice.” In my opinion, to find the answer we need to look back to our colonial past. At that time, ancient European metropolises and African elites awoke to maintain long-distance delays behind independence and supported dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
“Then, in the face of the supposed dignity and prosperity of democracy in the 1990s, many find themselves being ridiculed,” Seck continues. “Now our society is producing generations that do not feed from the same bottle. They communicate through social networks, expose themselves publicly, speak other languages. And they have their own intellectual producers. It is not a punctual one, but simply a structural one. It will continue and will jump all dykes and barriers.”
To understand the impact of this generation, we must first understand its demographic weight. 60% of Africa’s population is under 25 years of age. They were not living out anti-colonial liberation successes or democratic hopes. They grow up with their phones at hand and interacting with the world through them. See other possible worlds on your screen. They seek health that suits them, a minimum quality education, and find high-level jobs according to their conditions.
In Mali, it was a video of his son partying on a yacht that sparked the revolution that toppled President Keita in 2020. In Morocco, a woman who had been hospitalized for 10 years died due to poor anesthesia. Electricity and water outages in Madagascar.
These things happen occasionally, but they are deeply unpleasant. “The situation is different in each country, but the context is the same: a strong sense of rejection of dominant political practices and disillusionment with leaders perceived by some as too close to Western interests. For many African youth, political and social struggles remain a collective specter, sometimes fueled by disillusionment with the inheritance of the independence of great figures (…) and with contemporary realities and unfulfilled promises,” says Bar Traoré, the institute’s research director. Wati Learning Center.
Old regimes in Africa, with leaders who have been in power for 20, 30, or even 40 years, are showing signs of exhaustion, but they resist dying and do so with extreme violence. Testimonies of the dead and missing still remain in Tanzania, and mass graves have appeared in Kenya. “We are not scared,” said young Awa Agbesi, 24, over the phone from Togo. In Togo, this generation lost control of the state’s resorts in 1967 and continues to lead protests against the Eyadema family to this day. “They gas us, blow us up, disrupt our demonstrations. But we are determined to change the situation and this country moves forward. Only politicians think in their own pockets, we believe in the future,” he says solemnly. Increasingly educated women are playing a decisive role in these movements. “La Generación Z no hacho mais que asomar la cabeza,” he says.
Accusing the West of rampant corruption, nepotism, and disappearances, and disillusioned with their leaders, they take to networks and streets to assert themselves, unafraid to be pan-African, anti-colonial, sovereigntist, and anti-capitalist. In the Sahel and Guinea-Conakry, the military council that overcame the challenge of reading the signs of the times was Alzaron, whose power was supported by these young people.
Burkina Faso’s young leader, Captain Ibrahim Traore, 34, who has suspended all political activity and imprisoned those who spoke out against the military regime, has become a key figurehead for thousands of young people thanks to an intense propaganda campaign that cultivates new protesters on social networks. Videos of him wearing his eternal khaki campaign uniform, cutting ties with France and joining forces with Vladimir Putin to lead an African army against the West are spreading like gunpowder.
In the face of the forced withdrawal of territory and imagination from Europe and America, other powers and countries are establishing themselves as economic allies in terms of security and cultural references. Professor Seck expressed this in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the Black African Foundation Research Institute. “This combined war of sovereignty and class shows that only the remaining countries are repositioning Africa in a different position on the international relations map.Through migration, even if irregularly, and through different demands for cultural and material interests, even though they target the same population, they are making a difference between the continent and the world. (…) This trend does not exclude Russia, which, despite increasingly precise efforts to influence public opinion and intelligence in Africa, remains very limited to bilateral approaches.
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