Africa is a continent of young people. Thus, what they do, what they think, and what they are taught matters not only to Africa but to the future of the world. As Ugor writes in the introduction to this edited collection, these young people “have exploded as powerful social actors in the continent's public domain and on the world stage.”

I first learned about the agency of African youth not through books and journal articles but through my own lived experiences. In the mid-1980s, the antiapartheid and divestment movement was sweeping through campuses across the United States (Martin, 2007). As an undergraduate at Boston University, I was already part of multiple activist organizations. By the spring of 1985, I was fully immersed in the protests, rallies, and sit-ins that were happening every few days on my campus and on other campuses in the Boston and New York areas. For the first time in my life, I met and became friends with my peers from South Africa and throughout the continent. These friendships expanded and deepened through the next decade, as I worked for a Boston-based antiapartheid organization, Fund for a Free South Africa, which was founded by exiled members of the African National Congress. My first trip to South Africa was in late 1991, a few months after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and the nation entered a new era. The streets of Johannesburg pulsed with excitement, promise, and hope. On that first trip, I wandered for hours through this new city, simply absorbing the energy that surrounded me. I spent time with friends in restaurants, bars, bookstores, and community centers in Yeoville, Hillbrow, and farther afield. In the years that followed, I returned time and time again, because I could see and feel a different future on those streets.

Eventually, I landed in Durban with a Fulbright Award to do an ethnographic study of a desegregated school that was at the forefront of change. The “New South Africa” was being formed, contested, and imagined in that school—and schools like it—throughout the country. With my dissertation proposal recently defended, I arrived in South Africa in February 1996. I was ready to try to understand how young people were making sense of this new world, a tenuous leap into democracy and equality, after more than four hundred years of oppression.