The issue of youth lies at the very heart of crises and conflicts across sub-Saharan Africa. With a median age of 19, Africa has the youngest population in the world: 60% are under 25, and more than a third are aged between 15 and 24. By 2100, Africans under the age of 25 will number one billion. A vital force, but also – for many – a demographic time bomb ready to explode if adequate responses are not provided. Analysts refer to a “youth bulge”: millions of young people who are unemployed or trapped in precarious, poorly paid jobs, fuelling frustration and inequality. A vulnerable mass, easily drawn into radicalisation, violence or criminal networks. Hence the increasingly explicit notion of “exporting labour” to relieve internal pressure: migration encouraged by governments, also serving to maintain power.

The desire to “leave” is becoming the defining geopolitical fact of the 21^stcentury. These young people are children of no one, born of a stepmother-like globalisation that promises everything and delivers nothing. They lack guidance and direction, orphaned even from traditional families swept away by urbanisation and modernity. When they rebel, they are often deceived: from Sudan to the Sahel and as far as Madagascar, they overthrow corrupt leaders only to see power seized by the military. It is an African ’68 that fails to bring about change: revolts without revolution, shattered hopes. Democracy remains a mirage. In megacities, life is mere survival, and sects preaching prosperity theology spread an individualistic mindset in which everything can be bought, even salvation. It is a world where individual success replaces the common good. As Jean-Léonard Touadi observes, African youth experience a “double abandonment”: by their governments, which fear them, and by the rest of the world, which rejects them. They feel cursed in their own land and react with desperate energy: they learn to be aggressive, determined, less compliant than their parents. Their anger is a way of staying alive.

In Africa’s increasingly ungovernable megacities, daily life is a struggle for survival. “Every man for himself” and “self-preservation first” are the watchwords of a society shaped by prosperity theology preached by numerous religious sects: a doctrine that privatises hope and commodifies salvation. Everything has a price; nothing is free. Thus, individual salvation becomes intertwined with the rejection of the past – traditional, colonial and postcolonial – and even with the rejection of the foreigner.

African youth increasingly see themselves as alone, individuals detached from any sense of belonging. They claim the right to “take their share” of the world, even if that means forcing borders. This marks a completed anthropological revolution: the model is no longer the family, the clan, the nation or the continent, but the individual or the crowd, the multitude. For the new African intelligentsia, the continent is no longer “black” but “grey”: the romantic Africa that once dreamed of a shared destiny grounded in ubuntu, the sense of community, has faded away.

What remains is a disillusioned and sterile Africa which, amid corruption and violence, has failed to love its own children and now faces their rejection. This is the true fracture: an emotional rupture with oneself and with one’s own land. Even the expulsion of the French from the Sahel conceals a desire to reclaim one’s destiny, to learn once more to love a homeland that has ceased to welcome. For now, however, disorientation prevails. These young people, raised in the chaotic flow of globalisation, seek only to emerge, to exist, to succeed.

It is with them – with this restless and impatient generation – that the West will soon have to reckon.
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