How One Small Statistic Became a Story That Spanned a Continent

The 2-story home in Nairobi, Kenya that New York Occasions journalists have been renting because the early 2000s had some notable options when my household moved in three years in the past: banana, guava and avocado timber; a thatched, mud-walled hut within the backyard, constructed by a earlier Occasions reporter; and a small library of books about Africa amassed over a number of many years.

I dived in. Yellowing reference tomes, like “Africa South of the Sahara: 1996,” recalled a world earlier than Wikipedia. Biographies of the well-known jostled with these of the forgotten. A handful of admirably obscure works, like “Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527,” appeared solely untouched.

However the commonest form of e-book was one which purported to explain the state of Africa, often in sweeping phrases — and, much more perilously, that attempted to foretell its future. These books fell into two classes: In a single, titles alluded to dysfunction and battle, like “Africa in Chaos.” Within the different, titles sounded optimistic, virtually Panglossian. For instance: “Africa Rising.”

The sparring themes instructed how tough, even foolhardy, it was to make broad pronouncements about Africa, a continent that has regularly defied the self-declared specialists, often foreigners.

It may appear odd, then, that my subsequent large story thought risked falling into precisely the identical entice.

It began with a single truth. In 2022, I discovered that the median age in Africa was 19 — far decrease than on each different continent. The worldwide median age was 30; in Europe and North America it was 41; in elements of East Asia, like Japan, it was as excessive as 48.

I had a hanging statistic. However how might it translate right into a story?

My first impulse was to deal with 19-year-old Africans from a variety of nations and circumstances, exploring their lives, fears and desires as a technique to describe the forces reshaping the continent. However that gadget would have drawbacks. At 19, most of us are nonetheless attempting to determine what we wish from life. Younger Africans aren’t any totally different.

I delved deeper. Poring over databases revealed by the Inhabitants Division of the United Nations — enormous spreadsheets stretching again to 1950 — I discovered two information factors that, at first, appeared to sit down collectively uncomfortably.

It turned out that whereas Africa’s median age was the bottom of any continent’s, it was nonetheless rising: As lately as 1989, its median age was 16.

But Africa’s inhabitants was getting old at a far slower charge than different areas’, largely as a result of the continent had the world’s highest birthrates. In order populations shrank in Europe and East Asia, they continued to soar in Africa — a lot so, in actual fact, that by 2050 Africa is anticipated to be residence to one-quarter of the worldwide inhabitants and one-third of individuals aged 15 to 24.

It added as much as a interval of staggering change that might reshape not solely Africa however the world.

I had a narrative.

Others, like Edward Paice, the director of the Africa Analysis Institute in London, had already noticed this pattern. In 2021, he revealed “Youthquake,” a e-book that particulars Africa’s youth surge. I spoke to him and different specialists who have been each excited and anxious about this momentous shift.

At our annual Africa group assembly in Nairobi, different Occasions reporters shared their concepts about these modifications and the way they could make for a collection of tales.

Nonetheless, it might be difficult. I used to be trying to find straws within the wind of a demographic hurricane. However journalists don’t flip simply to the crystal ball. We’re extra snug utilizing historical past to tell the current. We’re reluctant forecasters.

And demography, the science that shapes these forecasts, has usually been abused or misunderstood. For many years, Africans have borne the brunt of Western fears about overpopulation. A Time journal cowl from 1960, titled “The Inhabitants Explosion,” prominently featured a bare-breasted African lady clutching a baby. In 1994, the author Robert D. Kaplan predicted that surging populations in West Africa would result in anarchy.

And but the inhabitants forecasts for 2050 have been largely dependable, specialists stated. It will be silly of me to disregard them. As I traveled throughout Africa over the following 18 months, reporting, I discovered hints of the youth growth in all places.

After a coup in Burkina Faso final yr, I met a person in his late 20s who had spent a decade bouncing from one West African nation to the following, working odd jobs — in gold mines, on farms and in fishing trawlers. He was an embodiment of a technology that has struggled to seek out constant work.

In Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, I choked on tear fuel as younger pro-democracy activists, a lot of them girls, clashed violently with the riot police throughout demonstrations — an indication of the brand new period of protest led by younger Africans pissed off with their previous, usually autocratic, leaders.

And in Kenya, I met younger folks fizzing with ambition and smarts, a lot of them working start-ups, who represented a aspect of younger Africa that always fails to make the information: a stressed vitality fueled by aspiration, innovation and a heady sense of chance.

Colleagues additionally discovered examples. Elian Peltier, The Occasions’s West Africa reporter, took a taxi with a younger rapper in Ivory Coast. Dionne Searcey, who wrote a e-book on the lives of girls in West Africa, discovered an inspiring college scholar in Senegal. Vivian Yee, based mostly in Egypt, spoke with a scholar exterior a faculty in Cairo.

Hannah Reyes Morales, a contract photographer, traveled throughout 5 nations, in search of out younger folks in school dorms, at trend exhibits, at spiritual ceremonies and even at a horse race. The scenes of pleasure, hustle and strife that she captured mirror this heart-racing second of change.

The outcome was “Previous World, Younger Africa,” which was revealed on-line final month and in print in a 40-page particular part. Within the coming weeks, different Occasions reporters will publish extra articles concerning the startling results of Africa’s youth growth.

What it’ll finally deliver — growth, doom or one thing in between — is prone to fluctuate between nations and areas.

As my little library demonstrates, capturing all of Africa in a single e-book or article is a tough if not unimaginable activity. Is demography future? It relies upon whom you ask.

But few doubt that epoch-defining change is underway on the continent — and our objective is to comply with the most important modifications, one after the other.