Like most Africans nowadays, I was not yet born during the colonial era.
By 1968, most of Africa had been liberated from European rule and I entered the world in the middle of Nigeria’s civil war (its first and, to date, only one). Conventional wisdom then had it that once freed of colonial bondage, Africa would use its resource advantage to make a great leap forward. The 2000s would be Africa’s century.
Despite the subsequent decades of underdevelopment, some still believe that this will be Africa’s century.
Where, I wonder, are the younger, vibrant leaders who can harness the energy of Africa’s increasingly youthful, urban and restless societies?
We’ve been here before – we’ve had Africa’s decade (that was the 1980s, I think), rock concerts have been thrown to save the recalcitrant continent, and world leaders have resolved to Make Poverty History. Yet even as India and China surge ahead with their double-digit growth, the likes of Bono, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick and Chevron chief executive officer David J. O’Reilly insist that Africa will be the hard drive of the new world.
This year, the World Cup of soccer will be held on African soil for the first time and 17 African countries celebrate the 50th anniversaries of their independence. These festivals of nostalgia could heighten a collective anxiety among Africans my age, about being remembered as a lost generation. In many countries, the leaders and their cronies – Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Senegal’s Abdullah Wade – have been in power ever since those days of liberation.
Only last year, Gabon’s Omar Bongo died with his presidential boots on at the age of 73. He had been in charge of the central African country for 41 years. By the time my cohort has wrested power from these reluctant fathers, we may no longer be relevant.
Another generation is being mass-produced, surfing on a wave of technological advance, presenting a demographic time bomb that threatens to detonate everything that has gone before them. But where, I wonder, are the younger, vibrant leaders who can harness the energy of Africa’s increasingly youthful, urban and restless societies?
It was not always like this. If I rewind the Pathé Newsreels of African history, I see young Turks such as, yes, Moammar Gadhafi and Robert Mugabe, not to mention the likes of Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) and Steve Biko (South Africa). There they are, all in their 20s and 30s, daring to stand up to the old order, leading their countries out of the bondage of colonialism, rejecting their parents’ institutionalized passivism and mobilizing moral outrage to separate from a Europe exhausted by the Second World War.
In memoirs such as Wole Soyinka’s colourful Ibadan, there’s a sense of a gilded age: The future Nobel laureate returns sheepishly from postgraduate studies in England, only to land on his feet as the creative director of Nigeria’s independence celebrations. My parents’ generation had it all to live for – access to good education at home (often created by colonial governments) or abroad, then almost invariably returning to take up good jobs in government or civil service. In the newly independent Africa, nations had to be built almost overnight, and young, educated men and women were pressed into exalted positions as generals and ministers, mapping out the future to fulfill their destinies. At the time, my father was a left-leaning provincial government official in his late 20s, a position that enabled him to cultivate a love of travelling as he visited places such as Cuba and Brazil as part of his education in administration.
