ABSTRACT
Recent youth protests in West Africa are by and large the result of a longstanding disenchantment with a system of government that provides very little for their development. African youth suffer from various degrees of ‘psychopathology’ (in Fanon’s 1961 understanding), a socially generated disorder rooted in oppression and unfreedom, an opaque future and an unbearable present. This psychopathology has to do with the impossibility to grow into full-fledged adults under the current political and socio-economic dispensations. At the same time, African youth have become bolder and freer in their relationship with political authority, and freer in the use of their bodies as means of expression, as shields and weapons in defiance of normative control and institutional brutality. In Senegal and Burkina Faso for instance, these movements have taken the form of socio-artistic genres and models (e.g. Y’en a Marre) that constitute powerful symbolic currents capable of representing the anguish, the anger, the grievances and the aspirations of disparate segments of society. These currents speak of subversion, defiance and civil disobedience. They propose to do away with waffling, the cult of personality, empty rhetoric and deceptive promises now associated with the postcolonial ruling elite, and they aim to amplify the indignation of all those who share a common feeling that ‘enough is enough’. This chapter therefore seeks to re-interrogate the dialectics of subversion in the context of changing perceptions of public action and alternatives to existing forms of political engagement by young people in Burkina Faso and Senegal.
