Tribune. Lifetime presidencies. Successions from father to son. Third term syndrome. Elections faked. Caporals, colonels and other armed men acclaimed in the streets of African capitals thanks to coup d’etat by a disoriented youth, without work and ready to risk their life on the perilous roads of migration. On social networks, endless praise of authoritarian regimes and, almost everywhere, xenophobia, racialism and conspiracy coated with the Pan -Africanism mask.
These phenomena are the symptoms of substantive movements and the great reconfigurations in progress in Africa in this first quarter of the twentieth e century. Three in particular deserve that we dwell on it.
It is, first of all, the intensification of social struggles concerning the extraction and private appropriation of resources, including natural. The relative liberalization of economic life at the end of the 1990s has indeed led to unprecedented revival and acceleration of the processes of training of social classes and dynamics of inequality. Extortion and predation practices have become widespread and now extend to all spheres of social life.
In turn, the transformation of the material conditions of existence had the effect of a significant change in the parameters of the political competition. This is now confused with conflicts for subsistence and for access to livelihoods. While the fight for the control of annuities and the various floating resources capture, gérontocratic powers are upset, are constantly strengthening their grip on society. The majority of the population may be made up of young people and women, the domination exercised by the old house the standard.
The discrepancy between the formidable resilience of societies, their ingenuity and their creativity, and the encystation of political systems, even the sterility of official institutions, has never been so blatant. The absence of intergenerational fluidity is no longer just a powerful obstacle to social and cultural innovation. It is the source of an anti-equal culture deeply rooted in consciences and constitutes one of the main factors for blocking African societies.
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