Since the late 1980s, the lives of young people in Africa have become a major subject of interest in African cultural studies. Currently estimated to be about four hundred million of the world's total youth population of 1.2 billion, and according to the African Union, approximately 77 percent of the continent's total inhabitants under the age of thirty-five, young people and children in Africa have taken center stage in African studies in recent years, not just because of their sheer numbers but primarily because of the multiple ways in which they have exploded as powerful social actors in the continent's public domain and on the world stage. Across the continent and beyond, African youth have become key players and influencers in the realms of politics, economy, the culture industry, religious movements, and all kinds of activist endeavors for social justice and change. But as Mamadou Diouf has rightly observed, “The dramatic eruption of young people in both the public and domestic spheres seems to have resulted in the construction of African youth as a threat, and to have provoked, within society as a whole, a panic that is simultaneously moral and civic.”

The dread and anxieties about the outburst and prominence of African youth in both local and transnational public spaces have prompted several studies that have documented and analyzed the social experiences of their lives, especially the numerous ways in which young people in Africa have been impacted adversely by global and local political-economic forces. These studies demonstrate clearly how the enduring legacies of colonial domination, compounded by failed postcolonial governance and the harsh social conditions triggered by aggressive liberalization and privatization, have left many young people and children in Africa in dire situations. Most young people in Africa live amidst social crises marked by chronic economic decline, joblessness, limited access to quality education and training, poor health-care services, lack of social amenities, and a general social climate of privation, insecurity, and uncertainty.