The riot police appeared out of nowhere, charging toward the young protesters trying to oust King Mswati III, who has ruled over the nation of Eswatini for 38 years. The pop of gunfire ricocheted through the streets, and the demonstrators started running for their lives.
Manqoba Motsa, a college student, and his fellow Communists quickly slipped into disguise, pulling plain T-shirts over their red hammer-and-sickle regalia. They ducked down a sloped street and raced away, thinking they had escaped.
Then Motsa’s phone rang: A close friend at the protest had been shot. They found him splayed on a bed in the emergency room, a bloody bandage around his torso, and a tube in his arm.
“We can’t stop fighting,” the wounded protester, Mhlonishwa Mtsetfwa, told the dozen red-clad Communist Party members surrounding his hospital bed. “We’ll do this until our last breath.”
Across much of Africa, that anger is palpable in restless young activists, like Motsa, who are pushing, protesting and at times risking their lives to remove long-reigning leaders they view as barriers to the continent’s true potential.
While the world grays and nations worry about collapsing without enough workers to support their aging populations, Africa — the youngest continent, with a median age of 19 — sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. It boasts ample young people to power economic growth and global influence.
But to the frustration of its youthful population, Africa also has some of the world’s longest-serving leaders, who often place their own personal gain and political longevity above the welfare of their nations, experts on the continent’s politics say.
At least 18 heads of state in Africa have held power for more than two decades in the postcolonial era, and many have left legacies of poverty, unemployment, unrest and a wealthy ruling elite far removed from the everyday struggles of their people.
Age is a huge political dividing line. The 10 countries with the biggest differences in the world between the leader’s age and the median age of the population are all in Africa, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Many African youths feel their governments are rotten to the core and are demanding something far beyond tinkering with traditional politics.
The Arab Spring in 2011, when young people helped to overthrow leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, set the stage for other youth uprisings in Africa. In few places have the youth uprisings been as surprising as in Eswatini, a kingdom of 1.2 million people that shed its colonial name, Swaziland, in 2018 on the order of the king.
Mswati, 55, the last ruling monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, took the throne as a teenager in 1986 — making him one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. But the king presides over a country where youth unemployment is a suffocating 58%. Many of the nation’s children are orphaned, mostly because their parents have died of AIDS.
Yet, to many young people, the king seems to almost flaunt his indifference. Critics said he showed up at a traditional ceremony wearing a watch that sells for 13 times the annual income of most of his subjects.
Thousands of citizens, most of them young, erupted in furious protests at his stifling reign in 2021, lighting up the skies with the flames of ransacked businesses, many connected to the king. Soldiers and the police responded with bullets, killing dozens.
The king’s father, King Sobhuza II, banned political parties from elections in 1973 and gave himself absolute power. A constitution adopted in 2005 put some checks on the king, but political parties are still banned from elections, although individuals can run on their own.
Motsa, a 28-year-old college senior struggling to scrounge enough tuition money to graduate, regrouped with activists last year for the 50th anniversary of Sobhuza’s decree, vowing to cause enough chaos to press an admittedly ambitious demand: They wanted a democracy.
Short of that, they hoped people would at least boycott last year’s national elections, arguing that voting merely gave the appearance of credibility to a bogus system.
“There will never be a situation that will come that will make us give up the fight,” Motsa said.
Even his own family cannot seem to stop him, a sign of how wide the generational chasm can be.
Motsa’s uncle said his activism would get him killed. His mother fears it will get the rest of them killed, too. And they are aghast at his treasonous demands to abolish the monarchy.
After all, his aunt is one of the king’s many wives; and his father, Samuel Mahlatsini Motsa, 55, is a soldier in the king’s army, sworn to protect the throne against all threats — including his son.
Manqoba Motsa almost followed his father’s path. After high school, he took an uncle’s advice and went through a ritual to become a member of the duty-bound regiments to protect Mswati. He thought it would help him get a job, perhaps as a police officer or, like his father, a soldier.
Instead, Motsa found himself in a position all too familiar to young Africans: He could not find work. Data from the African Development Bank Group shows that 15- to 35-year-olds on the continent are vastly underemployed or do not have stable jobs. The effects can be devastating, sometimes forcing them to migrate, turn to crime, or even turn to extremist groups.
Motsa ultimately found a job in a very different sector of the economy — as a laborer on an illicit marijuana farm, where he earned enough to pay for his first year of university.
He was struck by how many people struggled to buy food, despite working hard, while the king’s lavish life unspooled before them all on social media and in the news. Opposition figures publicly accused the king of buying 19 Rolls Royce and 120 BMWs for his large family, while public servants protested for better pay. Headlines recounted the royal family’s multimillion-dollar trip to Las Vegas and the $58 million spent on the royal plane, a decked-out Airbus measuring nearly three-quarters of the length of a football field.
A government spokesperson, Alpheous Nxumalo, said the king had fairly inherited his wealth and put profits from businesses controlled by the royal family into scholarships and other programs to alleviate poverty.
Motsa’s opposition to the monarchy stiffened when he started at the University of Eswatini in 2019 and joined the Communist Party.
Loved ones repeatedly told Motsa that his activism would bring death — and not only for him.
“This will cause people to kill us,” said his mother, Badzelisile Mirriam Motsa, 48, worrying that her son would turn the whole family into a target.
“You get a bullet and die,” warned his uncle Thando Dludlu, 55.
Many activists had dodged bullets during the uprising three years ago.
The upheaval had begun with mourning: a memorial service for a law student found dead on the side of the road. Many suspected foul play by police. After a scuffle among students and officers outside the memorial, police invaded the service, firing tear gas at the mourners.
Motsa said he and other activists struck back, throwing stones at a nearby police station. Some protesters tried to set it on fire, he said and gathered tires to burn in the streets. When police swooped in, residents blocked the officers, enabling Motsa to get away.
The rioting peaked in June 2021. The unrest was a release of simmering discontent. Surveys in 2021, shortly before the uprising, found that 69% of people polled were unsatisfied with the way democracy worked in their country, according to Afrobarometer, an independent research network.
Beyond the 27 deaths reported by the government — activists argue the actual number was more than 70 — the upheaval caused about $160 million worth of damage, according to Mswati.
“Something like this is pure evil,” the king said after the unrest. “You cannot say the country must burn to the ground because there is something you want.”
Nxumalo said the king had no problem making changes and pointed to the constitution, drafted with the king’s blessing nearly two decades ago after citizens raised concerns. What the king would not tolerate, Nxumalo said, were young activists acting like insurgents.
“No government negotiates with terrorists,” he said.
The fires of the uprising cooled, and the ransacked businesses were spruced up, but the anger remained. Motsa and his fellow student activists wanted to keep up the pressure by handing a petition directly to Parliament last year, bracing for a violent crackdown.
“This is the year to determine the democracy we want,” said Gabisile Ndukuya, a Communist Party member and the first woman to be elected president of the national student union.
When the moment of truth arrived in April, on the anniversary of Sobhuza’s decree, Motsa was pacing in a panic. It was 9:30 a.m., and the students were already 90 minutes late. They had hit the most basic and exasperating snag: They could not get a ride.
It turns out, that others wanted to protest the monarchy, too — and the national transportation union’s way of doing that was to go on strike. The bus company the students had hired suddenly bailed out.
Motsa feverishly made calls to try to salvage the students’ big moment, but the bad news kept coming. Soldiers and police officers were everywhere, searching cars at roadblocks. Bus drivers were too scared to ferry around a group of radicals. The students gave up and went home.
Motsa’s family might be loyal to Mswati — and even related to him — but their lives are far from the glossy palaces and luxury motorcades of the monarchy. The family homestead consists of modest cinder block structures with no running water. A tap out front, once used by the whole community, has been mostly dry for years. Motsa’s parents live in a square, two-bedroom unit with a corrugated tin roof.
Motsa has moments of doubt. Trudging through the green hills near his home village, he came to a clearing. Neat rows of marijuana plants sprung up near a creek — the business enterprise of his older brother.
Marijuana farming looked enticing. The university, facing a multimillion-dollar deficit, was enduring its longest closure yet. First, students went on strike to protest the lack of scholarships. Then, the faculty went on strike to demand higher wages.
Motsa, a fourth-year student in economics and statistics, said he was $97 in debt and needed an additional $162 to register for classes.
He scraped by with a few bucks from the occasional odd job, borrowing from friends or asking his parents. He felt he could get by on about $2.50 per day, but it was never guaranteed.
He bent over one of the plants and rubbed a leaf. This single plant could sell for more than $40, his brother’s business partner said.
A squad of officers had recently barged into the concrete room that the Communist Party used as a base, carrying rifles as a helicopter hovered overhead, witnesses said.
Before that, one of the king’s most vocal critics had been shot dead inside his home in front of his children. The government vehemently denied involvement; many, including the European Union ambassador, called the killing an assassination.
Motsa worries he could be next.
Police say they are seeking him for the burning of an Eswatini flag and an empty police truck on Sept. 30, 2022, when hundreds of students had gathered to demand scholarships.
Motsa went into hiding, trying to figure out his next move in what seemed to be a losing battle against the king.
With the police after him, Motsa caught a ride to the border and walked into South Africa this month, he said, hoping to continue the struggle in exile.
“We have not left because we fear the regime,” Motsa said, presenting his predicament as an opportunity — “to organize better, and organize with some anger, some anger necessary for us to gain the freedom we desire.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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