CONTINENTAL DRIFT: The Angry and Desperate Generation

By Binyavanga Wainaina (Originally published in Mail & Guardian Online) 

If you walk through the streets of Dakar or Nairobi or Douala, there they are. Well dressed, in well-selected second-hand clothes... They own nothing and have no prospects. Most have only high-school education or less. They cannot afford to marry or to live in any meaningful way on their own... [Their] life is focused around dealing with all [their] pent-up anger.

I was in Senegal for a few weeks, and was assisted by an able and creative young man. For a while, I wondered why he did not react to my text messages. His French was good. He dressed well, if rather flashily in my Anglophone view. We had a fight when I asked him for receipts and I realised he could not read.

One of the things I was curious about was those people who risk life, lungs and thousands of family dollars to get to Europe. All the news-papers talked about "desperation". It did not make such easy sense.

You have young Congolese men going to Angola with $5 000 to get on a ship to Brazil - not to find an economic future in one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but to work in Brazil and find their way to France.

In Senegal's Mbour, a kind of touristy Franco-African village, young men lift weights and run on the beach every day, training to cross the Sahara. They train as if they are planning an international sporting career, with commitment and pain. They talk, and plan and share intelligence. It has become a movement. France is no longer the place to go -- it is Italy and Spain. One group says "Barça or die". They take vows that if they do not get to Barça, they are prepared to die.

Now, none of these young men is starving. Many of them have educated parents: three meals a day. I interviewed one guy who had a chicken business supplying Mbour tourist hotels with eggs.

But he lived with his sister. A 22-year-old man lived with his sister, and had to account to her for his movements. His business was too undercapitalised to grow, so he did not make enough money to strike out on his own.

Every morning he wakes up at 4am to train. He likes traditional tonics and purgatives to remove toxins. He does not drink or smoke. He likes ganja, but once a week -- for thinking and meditating. He likes to come to the beach to meditate and pray on his own on Sunday nights. I asked him if he liked the French. He said no. He has contempt for them.

He had a lover, an older French woman in Mbour, but he left her. She was a Jezebel, he said. Women remove your focus. They dissipate your energy. He likes sex when he does not have to ejaculate, and keeps his energy. Every Friday, he fasts. Once, he fasted for a week, drinking only water, baobab juice and traditional medicine.

Once, he made his way to Mali, but ran out of options there. He was vague - some contact person did not materialise.

If you walk through the streets of Dakar or Nairobi or Douala, there they are. Well dressed, in well-selected second-hand clothes. Often religious, often Rastafarian, sometimes they organise around mystical traditional religions -- like Mungiki in Kenya. They own nothing and have no prospects. Most have only high-school education or less. They cannot afford to marry or to live in any meaningful way on their own.

If you asked them what they are able to do with the full measure of their will and muscle, they will have no answer. We have seen riots in Cameroon, Ouagadougou and Senegal. In Kenya, millions of them voted for the first time, and were at the centre of the violence, especially in the Rift Valley.

The urge to fight, to kill, to die on a boat on the way to France, is all about becoming a man. If there is an insurmountable humiliation, it is to be a human person with no control over your destiny, to have nothing on which to focus your abilities. Drugs may help, making you dazed and diluted. Your life is focused around dealing with all your pent-up anger.

Your hear about them everywhere, a zealous and often disciplined new tribe of young men living in nations too slow and static to challenge them.

I met a woman in Rwanda who told me she had to sell her major assets to send her sons to the United Kingdom to work as unskilled labourers. Her sons, all in their twenties, all university educated, were beginning to threaten their father with violence. He did not want them to go out at night. This was a year after the genocide -- he was terrified for them. He built a house for them in his compound. He threatened them with money and violence. "Stay still."

About a year ago, in Togo, I spent the night in the home of a polite young soccer player and his widowed mother. His bedroom was full of things that did not work: a dead television on a shelf; a blank old 486 computer on a desk; a little set of pretty coloured pens that had all run out of ink. Everything except the bed was an aspiration that did not function.

In the morning, as I lifted the mattress to tuck the sheets in, I saw a gun, thick and cold, sitting on the boards beneath.

Comments

[Innocent Ndifor Mancho]

I flush back the tears
Gorged up by the fears
For a generation doomed
By leaders possessed by greed

[blackstone]

VERY INTERESTING article. Thank you for posting it.

"I met a woman in Rwanda who told me she had to sell her major assets to send her sons to the United Kingdom to work as unskilled labourers. Her sons, all in their twenties, all university educated, were beginning to threaten their father with violence. He did not want them to go out at night. This was a year after the genocide -- he was terrified for them. He built a house for them in his compound. He threatened them with money and violence. "Stay still.""

I think this anecdote highlights how people want control over their lives and decisions.

[Judy]

Very deep and touching article. It clearly elucidates the plight and desperation of the African youth. Skilled and educated kids whose dreams have been destroyed by the greedy despots that rule them. Youths whose rights have been usurped by the people who have to nurture and protect them. Shame on African leaders.Thanks Dibussi.

[Nga Adolph]

The salvation for the African youth will come not from shying away in indifference and defeatism but from an intrepid will to remain optimistic,courageous and to inculcate in ourselves a visionary spirit.Africa has lost its dream of vision,it's time for youths to create this vision for they are the brain power of any nation.The youth must get involved,despite the great challenges they face,in rebuilding the future,lest they loose out.The world has gone global and we need to formulate new strategies to rebuild Africa.

We are in a generational revolution,like it or not.The youths of yesteryears who were the history makers are today the brutal hunters.The grey-haired generation,the baobabs have clearly failed us as we continue to wallow in misery and deep graft.It is ironical that in a continent where the youth constitute the majority,they are the first to die while the old gain power.We can no longer depend on the 'baobabs'to resolve our problems.And in the 21st century old age is no longer the determinant for ability.

African countries have become 'economic cemetaries' and we can no longer depend on the public sector for employment.We must turn to the private sector,be our own employers,our own entrepreneurs.This will mean that the African youth must seek to gain skills and initiate projects and seek for investments.Yes,this is an uphill task for the youth who live in economically unfriendly environments and educational systems that are skeletons of themselves and are unadaptable to the job market.

Then need then arises for youths to constitute themselves into joint ventures and partnerships in all sectors of society be it economic,social or political.The creation of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises(SME) and with networking between youths in the same country,regional groupings,in Africa and the diaspora will not only strengthen our economies and foster democracy but will accelerate the process towards African Unity.

But this cannot happen if we donot provoke change in our political systems so as to create a conducive environment for business.The problem with youth activism today in Africa is the lack of ideology.Those manifestos that empowered the generation of the Nkrumah's,kaunda's,Nyerere's et al.But we must be in a perpetual search for a common ideology that will metamorphosise Africa and mount her unto its rightful place.

Nga Adolph,
Leuven_Belgium