As Andry Rajoelina, Madagascar’s president, fled the country earlier this month, before generals seized control of the island nation, he may not have had time to take in the sight of a flag held aloft by protesters bearing the symbol of a skull-and-crossbones wearing a straw hat. Demonstrators from Generation Z, who have rattled leaders from Nepal and Indonesia to Morocco, Peru and now Madagascar, have rallied under the same image, taken from a Japanese manga featuring a group of misfits fighting a corrupt and oppressive regime.
Whether you call them the TikTok generation, Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) or simply student protesters, young people the world over are demanding — and in some cases affecting — political change. Just ask Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister of Bangladesh, who was drummed out of office by student-led protests last year.
Gen Z protests are particularly significant in countries where the median age is low, as in Madagascar where half the population is below 19. There, protests were ignited by power and water cuts, but, as in other countries, a dearth of jobs and a disgust with elites flaunting their wealth were deeper causes.
In Africa, where the median age is 19 and job creation is woeful, young people are an increasingly potent, if unpredictable, force. It was tech-savvy youth in Sudan who helped propel a wave of protests that toppled the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Last year, in Kenya, protesters explicitly identifying as Gen Z forced President William Ruto to reverse proposed tax increases and sack his cabinet. And just this month, in Morocco, protesters calling themselves Gen Z 212 (after the dialling code) took to the streets of Rabat, Casablanca and Tangier to demand better prospects and to decry spending on the 2030 World Cup, which Morocco is co-hosting.
Most Gen Z protests — organised in the social media ether — lack obvious leaders. That is a strength, making them hydra-headed and harder to suppress in countries from Kenya to Iran, where they keep resurfacing despite murderous state repression. But the amorphous nature of Gen Z protests is also a weakness. They often lack the means to convert legitimate anger into coherent policies or alternative political structures, leaving them susceptible to charismatic strongmen offering instant solutions.
The cult status of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s self-styled anti-imperialist revolutionary and a master of TikTok, is a case in point. It may not be a stretch to see US President Donald Trump, who was also quick to grasp the political utility of TikTok, as a beneficiary of youth seeking the shattering of politics-as-normal.
Gen Z can be a source of political instability. In Sudan, an idealistic civilian movement saw its power snatched by generals who then plunged the country into a vicious civil war. In Madagascar, Rajoelina himself, then a 34-year-old DJ, was swept to power in 2009 in a previous cycle of youth protests only to be pushed out of office by the next generation and a few generals. Youth protests are also easy prey for disinformation campaigns that can twist legitimate grievances to nefarious ends, including support for Russian mercenaries or homegrown coups.
Still, Gen Z protesters can be a force for good, putting entrenched elites on notice that politics is a social contract, not a licence to loot. Many leaders will calculate that their best chance of survival is to crush protests. But they should be aware that youth movements will keep coming back. A better way of surviving is to create an environment conducive to jobs, services and security. Those leaders that cannot provide such basics can expect to see a skull-and-crossbones flag on a street near them soon.