From Kenya to Madagascar, from Senegal to Cameroon, from Tanzania to Nigeria, or from Morocco to Mozambique. A wave of protests led by young people under 30, called “Generación Z,” is moving across Africa and appears unstoppable. They occupy streets and public places, confront regime forces, and revive elections or tamban systems. Some countries face leaders who are eternally in power and make mistakes at the ballot box, while others struggle with expensive living, lack of jobs, or water and electricity outages. They organize themselves on social networks as horizontal movements. They want, not promises, to search for new references and allies, and they make leaps over the layers of old agreements that serve their priests and their abusers, but they stifle this African Generation Z, which feels so angry with the old generation because it is free from all obligation.
As if it was a symbol of what is happening, in just one week in October, the African continent witnessed the re-election of three presidents: President Paul Biya, who is 92 years old, and has held this position since 1982; Marvelino Alassane Ouattara, 83, who is beginning his fourth presidential term, and Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan, 65, who leads a political party that has been in power since 1977.
In all three countries, the path to re-election became free after the main opposition leaders were banned from serving in the presidency after being imprisoned, sentenced or removed through judicial means. This measure is not new, but it is not easy to understand: protests have shaken electoral processes, especially strongly in Tanzania, where they have learned of deaths due to police violence.
Weeks ago, Madagascar’s president, Andry Rajoelina, left the country after a month of protests by young people who threw a pirate flag with a comical sombrero. one piece. Meanwhile, Generation Z youth have shaken the usual stability in Morocco by demanding more money for hospitals and schools and less money to build soccer stadiums.
In Kenya, an attempt to increase taxes last year resulted in demonstrations that burned down parliament and were violently suppressed, while in Senegal thousands of young people erupted in rage in 2021 against a government that used justice to attack opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, encouraging an electoral shift from the street. Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda and Togo have also witnessed recent protests, with the common denominator being youth.
Compensation and justice
“They are rebels when there is no political utopia,” asserts Abderrahmane Seck, a Senegalese anthropologist and historian. “Young people are not demanding democracy, but compensation and justice.” In my opinion, it is necessary to look to the colonial past to find the answers, when the old European capitals and African elites woke up to maintain far-reaching delays behind independence and support dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
“Then, after the supposed democratization of the 1990s in the face of dignity and prosperity, many people feel that they have been ridiculed,” Seck continues. “Now, our societies have produced a generation that has not been fed from the same bottle: they communicate through social networks, reveal themselves publicly, and speak other languages. They have their own intellectual producers. It is not something precise, but merely structural. It will continue and will overcome all barriers and barriers.”
You have to understand the impact of this generation first by understanding its demographic weight: 60% of Africa’s population is under 25 years old. They did not experience the success of anti-colonial liberation or the hope of democracy. They grow up with a mobile phone at hand with which they can communicate with the world. Look on your screens at other possible worlds. They demand health that suits them, education of a minimum quality, and access to a job with a level of strength in the circumstances.
In Mali, the spark of the revolutions that toppled President Keita in 2020 was a widely circulated video showing his son celebrating on a yacht. In Morocco, a decade of women died in a hospital due to anesthesia and were in poor condition. In Madagascar, electricity and water outages.
These are occasional events, but the discomfort is profound. “Although contexts differ from country to country, the background is the same: a strong rejection of dominant political practices and disillusionment with their leaders, seen by some as too close to Western interests. For many young Africans, political and social struggle remains a collective specter sometimes fueled by the inheritance of great figures from there independence (…) and disillusionment in the face of contemporary reality and unfulfilled promises,” says Bah Traoré, head of research at the Center for Wati Studies.
Old African regimes, led by leaders who have spent 20, 30 or 40 years in power, show signs of fatigue but resist death and do so with extreme violence. In Tanzania, there are still accounts of their dead and missing, and in Kenya, mass graves have appeared. “We are not afraid,” says Awa Agbesi, 24, by phone from Togo, where this generation is leading protests against the Eyadema clan, which lost control of the country’s resorts in 1967 until today. “They gass us, beat us, and prevent us from demonstrating. But we are determined to change things and for our country to advance. Politicians alone think about their pockets, and we believe in the future,” he says seriously. Women, increasingly educated, play a crucial role in these movements. “La Generación Z no hacho mais que asomar la cabeza,” he says.
Disillusioned with their leaders, accusing them of widespread corruption, nepotism, and hiding in the face of the West, they took to the gridirons or the streets and declared themselves without fear of pan-African nationalists, anti-colonialists, sovereigntists, or anti-capitalists. In the Sahel region or in Guinea Conakry, the military juntas that vigorously defeated the reading of the sign of the time were supported by these young men.
Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the young leader of Burkina Faso (34 years old), suspended all his political activity and imprisoned everyone who expressed opposition to his military regime, but he became a major reference for thousands of young people thanks to a fierce propaganda campaign in which new demonstrators are fed, on social media networks. Videos of him, dressed in his eternal khaki campaign uniform, cutting ties with France, marching alongside Vladimir Putin and leading African forces against the West, are spreading like gunpowder.
In the face of the forced withdrawal of Europe and the United States from its territory and imagination, other powers and countries are gaining prominence as economic allies, in terms of security and including cultural references. In a recent article published in the Bulletin of the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa, Professor Seck expressed this. “This combined war for sovereignty and classes proves that only the remaining states are rearranging Africa differently on the map of international relations. Although they include the same populations, through migration, even irregularly, and also through alternative demands for cultural and material benefits, they are reshaping the continent’s ties with the rest of the world. (…) This trend does not exclude Russia, which, despite its increasingly subtle efforts to influence public opinion and African thought, remains completely limited to a bilateral approach centered around a vague military cooperation. “Security.”
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