The first political slogan I learned was probably the alliterative, Le PAS ne passera pas (‘SAP [Structural Adjustment Program] shall not pass’) – supplemented by Pas moins d’État, mieux d’État (‘Not less state, a better state’). In a world where globalization would have been political, protesters in those demonstrations would have marched on Washington’s 19th Street NW, not on a thoroughfare in Niamey where all they did was to disturb the street hawkers. But they did not march in Washington, and the SAP passed. What then followed was a kind of psychological dry spell, which all the Conjunctures in the world could not quench. The fall of ‘progress’ scrambled the map we had relied on since independence, and many felt lost. But even that did not last.

The screen generation is not as easy to read. The fact that they do not read – at least not the way we read – means that they are inscrutable in a way that cannot be chalked up only to a proverbial generational divide. They are in some sense inscrutable to each other. Our text culture created a generational space that made debates possible, clashes inevitable and even sought after. The youth seem to fold themselves into their virtual and networked worlds. They lack a generational public space, or perhaps have no need for it, because the maps have become a maze and the absence of fixed references come with a kind of freedom from expectation which previous generations could not imagine. Much of this must be true for the screen generation the world over. The difference, in the Sahel, is the conditions in which they operate. In Niger, there was in the early sixties a radical progressist movement, Sawaba, that was crushed by its more moderately progressivist rivals of the Nigerien Progressive Party (everyone was progressive back then!) and became decades later the subject of a 900-page book by the Dutch historian Klaas van Walraven, The Yearning for Relief. Relief, not progress, was really what it was all about – relief from drudgery and power, relief to be oneself, and, to quote a Songhay text from Boubou Hama – a nemesis of Sawaba – relief to be able to be bere nda ni wono, ‘great with one’s own’. The younger generation of Sahelians still yearn for that relief, and they perhaps have a better chance to find it in the open maze, outside the doctrinaire maps of their elders.