The Role of the Youth in Africa's future.

Africa is a tale not many can recite. It is a story of hopelessness, of weary surjourn, of lost dreams.
But it is also a coming to terms with life, with our place in a changing world, and aspirations in new times.
We are caught in an uncomfortable position; between rock and a hard place. Between a world that doesn't have a place for us, and a future without purpose.
We are lost. Our history was taken from us. Our past is an ugly ink-spot on canvass.
And yet we still seek our place. We hope against hope, that we will wake up tomorrow, and the world would look at us as part of it. And each evening, we hope again.

Here in Africa, we are trying to re-invent ourselves. But its hard. THe west has an ideal within which we should apply ourselves (if we want those loans). The east is silent about Africa. Africa has not forgotten what she wants to look like; but the world has taught her to be shamed of her dreams and desires. She is like a budding woman; told that passion and lust is sin.

Our leaders; Jah help them; are so in love with pink campagne and german cars that they are blinded to the people's problems, and as thus lead our nations in a downward spiral into the abyss. But all this has been said before.

But what about the youth. However long African leaders can cling to power, they are not immortal. Should the youth even wait for these offs to die off?
Is there nothing that can be done to subjugate the issues at hand? Can we not raise arms and work for that dream we want? Not the western dreams, but our unadulterated dream?

The sons and daughters of Zimbabwe precede us. The Ujaama Youth Policy has strung together an encouraging set of coups on old farming problems.
More of my friends take private local-lingua classes behind their parents' backs (our father's generation believes talking like the white man makes us better people).

These are small but important gestures of cognitive reconstruction.

What we need to discuss, if the fora thinks it apt, is ways to nurture this new line of thought, and to look for a distintive role for the youth in Africa's future.