Protesters in Madagascar raising the ‘One Piece’ skull and cross bones, with an adapted Malagasy hat. Screenshot from the video ‘Madagascar president flees country amid Gen Z protests’ uploaded to YouTube by Channel 4 News. Fair use.

By Jessica Northey and Narda Natioranomena 

Across the African continent, from Madagascar to Morocco, young people known as Generation Z, those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s, are taking to the streets to demand social justice and have their voices heard.

Beginning on September 25, Gen Z protests erupted in Madagascar, initially focused on the persistent power outages and water shortages that have plagued the country for months. This quickly expanded to target corruption, rampant inequalities, the lack of food security and later calls for the president to leave. On October 12, when it became clear that the anger against him meant his life was in danger, President Andry Rajoelina disappeared. He was later reported to have travelled via the French island of Reunion to Dubai.

The peaceful demonstrations, organized on social media, faced heavy repression from the authorities, leading to the deaths of 22 people, according to the UN. A special advisor to the president, speaking with TV5 Monde, denied that any deaths had occurred, much to the dismay of the protesters, who accused the government of lying.

Inspired by similar youth demonstrations in Nepal, the Malagasy Gen Z youth movement uses the same Japanese manga “One Piece” symbol of the skull and crossbones, with an adapted Malagasy hat. Protesters marched en masse across the capital, major cities and in the diaspora across the world.

Real demands

Meanwhile, in Morocco, mass youth demonstrations erupted in mid-September, focusing on inadequate and negligent healthcare, a lack of education, and corruption.

Why have these Gen Z revolutionary movements ignited now? And are they connected?

In Madagascar, there had long been dissatisfaction with the president and his network of extremely wealthy elites. Visible wealth and economic growth are evident throughout Madagascar, with new construction, high-rise buildings, and large SUVs crowding the streets of the capital, where the majority of people walk on non-existent sidewalks. Young people criticized a new football stadium and what is largely considered an ill-conceived yet very expensive electric cable car in the capital, despite severe electricity and water shortages.

The discovery of critical minerals, new mines and resources across the country underlines the riches and wealth in the Malagasy soils and waters. From sapphires, gold, graphite and cobalt, to vanilla, lychees, cocoa and coffee, Madagascar is increasingly and visibly abundant in natural resources.

Yet, the average Malagasy is poorer today than they were 20 years ago. Seventy-five percent live beneath the poverty line, and the international companies extracting those resources often appear to care little for Madagascar’s natural environment. The president provoked even  further outrage over his disconnection with the lives of the majority when he justified glaring inequalities in an interview with TV5 Monde Journal Afrique, declaring that the rural poor in Madagascar were “nevertheless happy.”

In the case of Morocco, the recent deaths of eight women in childbirth sparked the initial protests. Also organizing via social media, young people have demonstrated for days, calling out the huge expenditure on football stadiums, while women and youth are marginalised, and their parents are denied decent health care.

They are demanding basic services including health and education, and an end to corruption, which, they argue, reigns at every level of state service. As in Madagascar, they express a love of their homeland and a deep commitment to freedom of speech.

Not willing to be sacrificed for football infrastructure, they demonstrate on the streets, supporting one another as they do. Volunteer doctors care for injured protesters, lawyers represent the victims for free, and communities provide food, in a context of serious risks of repression and state violence. The protests at two ends of the African continent are strikingly similar.

Colonial pasts

One root cause in Madagascar is perhaps clear. While French and international media may neglect this issue, addressing it transparently could have significant implications across Africa and beyond. In 2009, when Andry Rajoelina, then mayor of the capital, launched his first coup d’etat, he did so while taking refuge in the French embassy. In 2014, five years later, he became a naturalized French citizen. Since his coup in 2009 and presidency of Madagascar in 2018, there has been an influx of French businesses and influence in France’s former colony.

Apart from numerous anomalies in the 2023 presidential election, with protesters jailed and opposition harassed, Rajoelina is, according to Article 46 of the constitution, not allowed to have French citizenship as president of Madagascar. That a former colonial power should return to an independent country is unbearable for African youth.

Madagascar shed blood in 1947 when an anticolonial rebellion led to brutal repression across the country. Similar to the atrocities committed in Algeria in the late 1950s, the French military carried out mass violence in Madagascar between 1947 and 1949. This included executions, torture, rape, the destruction of entire villages, and the horrific practice of throwing live Malagasy prisoners from airplanes, which became known as “death flights.”

The number of casualties is difficult to confirm, but there are estimates that 100,000 Malagasy were killed, compared to hundreds of French nationals. This brutality and its lasting scars are documented in films such as Raymond Rajaonarivelo’s “Tabataba”  and novels such as Andry Andraina’s “Mitaraina ny tany,” (“The Earth is Lamenting”), and in the case of North Africa, in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film “The Battle of Algiers.”

And today, 65 years after independence, the Malagasy population demanded, albeit respectfully and peacefully, that France take their French president back, before he subsequently left on a French military plane. France bears its share of responsibility for the 2009 Malagasy crisis, and for the current one.  Reflecting on this could trigger wider self-reflection in European countries.

The failure of the French and European education systems to engage honestly with colonial pasts is part of a systemic problem of global injustice and oligarchical control over our media and the world’s resources. This amnesia feeds into the rise of the European far right today, perpetuates the extraction and destruction of former colonies, and exacerbates our collective global inequalities and ecological crises.

While common threads have been identified, the colonial factor has been largely ignored. Across Africa, young people feel an increasing sense of injustice that former colonial powers continue to exploit resources, economies and societies, with no recognition of past crimes and no accountability for those continuing legacies. This not only damages Africa and former colonies around the world, but also underpins the constant malaise, or what Alistair Horne described as a legacy of “poison” with violence and inequalities in Europe and its settler colonial partners.

African and global majority youth, from Madagascar to Morocco, from the Philippines to Nepal, have stood up to protest these searing inequalities and demand social justice. As they open our eyes to an opportunity for much wider reflection on the continuing effects of colonialism in the 21st century, they, and whatever transition processes follow, deserve our full support.