De Antananarivo à Lagos : la jeunesse africaine lutte pour l'Afrique

Le 3 octobre 2025, le président de Madagascar Andry Rajoelina a pris Facebook Live avec une revendication extraordinaire. Après une semaine de manifestations menées principalement par des activistes du Gen Z dans les rues d'Antananarivo et d'autres villes, Rajoelina a rejeté le mouvement comme une tentative de coup orchestrée par des forces obscures. Il a accusé "une frange de l'opposition" et sans nom "agences étrangères" de payer les jeunes pour se lever—non pas pour rechercher la justice ou la réforme, mais pour le renverser. Il a même suggéré que des « cyberattaques » et des « robots » étaient déployés pour manipuler la jeunesse malgache en rébellion. Le président n'a rien donné.

Ce qu'il a fait était une image de leadership qui voit les jeunes non pas comme des citoyens, mais comme des pions, incapables de penser pour eux-mêmes. La réaction était rapide. "Il nous infantilise", a déclaré un manifestant à RFI. « Son discours montre qu'il prend les jeunes pour des idiots, manipulés par des forces obscures, comme si nous ne pouvions pas penser par nous-mêmes. » Un autre a souligné la blessure culturelle plus profonde: "Il y a une fracture générationnelle à Madagascar—Les anciens croient toujours qu'ils savent mieux que les jeunes. En quelques heures, les médias sociaux se sont remplis de mèmes se moquant de la théorie Rajoelina—preuve encore une fois que les jeunes d'Afrique savent transformer même la répression en ironie et résistance. Ou pour emprunter le sous-titre de mon dernier livre, les Africains savent sourire tout en souffrant.

Ce moment à Madagascar n'est pas seulement une manifestation locale. C'est un miroir tenu par l'Afrique sur les échecs du leadership à vivre à la hauteur des espoirs et des rêves des pères fondateurs et des mères de l'Afrique moderne. Nous manquons à nos jeunes et trahissons le continent par la mauvaise gouvernance, la corruption, la répression et le refus de construire des États inclusifs où chaque Africain peut prospérer. En Afrique, les jeunes s'élèvent—agité, créatif, en colère, plein d'espoir et impatient avec les élites qui s'accrochent au pouvoir. Et à travers le continent, les dirigeants répondent avec le même livre de jeu fatigué: nier, rejeter, réprimer et blâmer les étrangers. Madagascar appartient aujourd'hui à la même phrase que le Maroc, le Nigéria, le Kenya, le Soudan et la Tunisie.

Au Maroc, le mécontentement des jeunes s'est effondré dans les manifestations contre le chômage, la corruption et l'inégalité. Comme à Madagascar, les dirigeants rejettent les jeunes comme naïfs ou manipulés, et réagissent avec une police lourde plutôt qu'avec le dialogue. Mais les racines du mécontentement sont claires : une génération enfermée hors de l'avenir, privée de participation à la vie publique et privée de la dignité du travail. Les soulèvements au Maroc font écho à ceux de la Tunisie, où en décembre 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, un vendeur de rue de 26 ans humilié par la police, s'est mis en feu. Son acte désespéré a enflammé le Printemps arabe, renversé les dictateurs, remodelé les paysages politiques, et montré que le désespoir et la détermination d'un seul jeune pouvait déclencher la révolution. La Tunisie lutte aujourd'hui pour maintenir son expérience démocratique, avec de nombreuses promesses non tenues, mais le Printemps arabe reste un témoignage du pouvoir de la colère des jeunes et de l'aspiration à redessiner des cartes politiques. On pourrait aussi établir un parallèle avec le récent soulèvement des jeunes au Népal, qui a réussi à renverser un gouvernement corrompu, insensible et oppressif.

Sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed parallel movements. In Kenya, youth have become the central force in repeated mobilizations against economic injustice, corruption, and electoral manipulation. The 2023 cost-of-living protests revealed a generation capable of using digital platforms not just for entertainment but for coordination, documentation, and amplification of dissent. Kenyan youth no longer wait for permission from political parties or religious leaders; they are scripting their own participation in national life.

In Nigeria, the 2020 #EndSARS movement against police brutality became one of the clearest signs of Africa’s youth awakening. Young Nigerians occupied streets, organized mutual aid, and used hashtags to unite a generation against state violence. The government responded with force, culminating in the Lekki Toll Gate massacre. Yet the legacy of #EndSARS has not died. It deepened solidarity and political consciousness among Nigerian youth, who increasingly see themselves not as passive subjects but as active shapers of the nation’s destiny.

Sudan offers the most sobering case. In 2019, youth-led protests toppled Omar al-Bashir after thirty years of dictatorship. For a moment, Sudanese youth stood as global icons of courage and liberation. Yet the euphoria was betrayed when the military hijacked the revolution, plunging the country into renewed repression and civil war. The tragedy of Sudan is not the weakness of its youth but the intransigence of elites who could not imagine sharing power. And yet even amid devastation, the youth networks that organized the revolution remain alive underground, sustaining solidarity, mutual care, and alternative visions of governance. Sudanese youth remind us that an uprising is not only about removing tyrants but about cultivating citizenship, communal resilience, and political imagination.

Taken together, these examples show both continuity and novelty in Africa’s youth uprisings. Leaders have long underestimated the intelligence, resilience, and determination of their young citizens. The dismissals are always the same: the youth are immature, manipulated, a threat to stability. But digital media has given today’s generation unprecedented tools of mobilization and connection. As the late Ghanaian economist George Ayittey once observed, Africa’s “cheetah generation” has the potential to lead Africa into a new future by breaking the cycle of decay that has held the continent down for ages. A tweet in Lagos resonates in Nairobi; a meme in Antananarivo spreads across francophone Africa; videos from Khartoum circulate to Casablanca and beyond. African young people are teaching one another, learning from one another’s struggles, and weaving an intercontinental narrative of resistance that will soon cascade with transformative effect.

At the heart of this generational conflict is not only poverty or unemployment, though these are crushing realities. Nor is it only foreign interference, though global powers often transplant their geopolitical battles onto African soil, treating African leaders as pawns while hollowing out the continent’s resources. The deeper issue is the refusal of Africa’s ruling elites to listen. Leaders infantilize youth, imagining that repression will secure stability. Yet history proves the opposite: repression radicalizes, silence breeds rage, and violence sows the seeds of future revolt.

Here Augustine of Hippo speaks with uncanny relevance. Writing in the turmoil of the late Roman Empire, Augustine argued that societies are defined by their loves: amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei—love of self to the point of contempt for God—creates the earthly city of domination, while amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui—love of God to the point of self-forgetfulness—creates the city of justice. Africa’s politics today is marked by the first. Leaders cling to power for self-interest, practicing what Jean-François Bayart called la politique du ventre—the politics of the stomach—protecting themselves from accountability while the people suffer. Yet in the rising voices of African youth, we glimpse the second: a longing for justice, dignity, Ubuntu, and solidarity. History, for Augustine, is not static. It is shaped by the loves and choices of people. Cultures change because hearts change, and political futures are redrawn when loves are reoriented away from ego toward the common good.

Africa’s youth uprisings are not merely political disruptions. They are signs of a deeper hunger for reorientation: a generation searching for meaning, dignity, and a future worth inhabiting. Malagasy youth mocked Rajoelina’s talk of “robots” because they know too well that what drives them to the streets is not cyber manipulation but lived reality—the frustration of poverty forcing many into perilous exile across the Sahara and Mediterranean, the sting of exclusion, the humiliation of being treated as children in their own homeland. Nigerian youth under the #EndSARS banner were not manipulated; they were responding to years of extortion and brutality. Sudanese youth were not pawns; they were reclaiming a stolen future. Tunisian youth in 2011 were not foreign agents; they were demanding bread, dignity, and freedom.

To continue to dismiss Africa’s youth as incapable of serious political thought is to refuse reality. To repress their movements is to declare war on the future. What Africa needs is a new imagination of politics—one that recognizes youth not as leaders of tomorrow but as leaders of today, or as Pope Francis insists, the “Church of Now.” They are already shaping discourse, mobilizing communities, and redefining citizenship. They are the conscience of the continent.

The Church and educational institutions cannot remain neutral. Too often they have sided with power or retreated into silence. Yet Augustine reminds us that history is a web of signs to be read with wisdom and love. To read the signs of the times today is to recognize Africa’s restless youth not as a threat to be repressed but as a gift to be received. Their demands for accountability and justice echo God’s justice inscribed in human hearts. Faith that demonizes protest malfunctions, just as cultures without faith collapse into cynicism. By the same token to live a life of acquiescence and resignation to the current toxic politics in many African countries and the unbroken cycle of social ennui of a client state and state capture in the face of Africa’s faltering democracy as if it was an act of God is to fail in our prophetic commitment as Church.

The question that now confronts Africa is whether its leaders will learn to listen before it is too late. If they continue to repress, they will fuel the instability they fear. If they continue to infantilize, they will deepen rage and accelerate the crisis with devastating collapse of African societies. It is time for African leaders to rethink their transactional and extractive leadership. They must choose dialogue over denial, humility over hubris, partnership over repression and usher in a generational paradigm shift that is badly needed to change the trajectory of history in our beloved continent.

Africa stands at a crossroads. Elections loom in Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Uganda, with the same old men clinging to power as though it were their birthright. Men who have run out of ideas and now stand as obstacles to Africa’s future. From Antananarivo to Lagos, from Nairobi to Khartoum, from Rabat to Tunis, Africa’s youth are saying with one voice that they will no longer be silenced. The question that remains is whether the Church and civil society will accompany Africa’s restive and ambitious young people so that they can now move from protest to political activism capable of replacing a failed political class and liberating Africa’s future.