This article was published in this morning’s Standard. I had hoped for better, but this is (sadly) long on anecdote, and short on relevant analysis.
We (especially the older generation) love dumping on the millennial generation. They are the source and target of our jokes and jibes, but much of that dumping is both misinformed and misplaced.
First, some thoughts about generations. ‘Baby Boomers’, ‘Generation X’ and more are largely meaningless when applied to non-American/ Western demographics. Why? The baby boom that happened in the West (especially the USA) was a very specific phenomenon. Soldiers coming back from WWII, newly demobbed and with new opportunities (for education and cheap housing through the GI Bill*) took advantage of their new prosperity to, well, make babies, hence the ‘baby boom’ from c. 1946 - c.1964. *for white veterans
But it was not just the large number of births that created that as a definitive generation. The explosion in economic growth (and thus sharply rising standard of living) was experienced in most of the West and Japan between the late 1940s and late 60s. The Germans called it the wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle), and this saw that generation not only experiencing material comforts (better housing and education), but also smaller families, meaning that these were also quite coddled children.
They reached their adolescence in the 1960s, with two major outcomes. One, they didn’t know privation, so the world was their oyster and two, they felt a reckoning was due from their parents for how they prosecuted WWII, hence the ructions of that decade (especially 1968). THAT was the making of the legend of the Baby Boomers, and why it is so irrelevant to us (Kenyans and Africans). For us, the 1950s were not the years of the wirtschaftswunder - they were the years of the liberation war. Our WWII veterans (who were marched into slavery-as-war) did not come home to a life of white picket fences and free university education, but to a tightening colour bar and remarkably cruel colonial oppression. There was no baby boom - or baby boomers - here.
Our parents may have worn mini skirts and bell bottoms in the 1960s and 1970s. They may have danced to the twist and had towering afros, but their generational (and individual) experiences were remarkably different. They are NOT baby boomers.
What about the other generations we love referring to? Generation X (1965-1980)? Again, their birth years may be similar, but their experiences are as different as night and day. The 1980s and 1990s (their childhood and adolescence) were not the same. In the West, these were the Reagan/ Thatcher/ Kohl years, when coming out of the stagflation of the 1970s into the go-go years of the 1980s. And then the end of the cold war and fin de siècle Clinton/ Blair years and the unipolar, triumphalist world. Two decades without care.
Us? Us, we started the 1980s with the coup attempt, continued the decade through the Mwakenya/ Nyayo House repression of mid-decade, and ended it with structural adjustment and mass layoffs. We went through the 1990s of Goldenberg, economic collapse and the ructions of multiparty politics.
The article in the Standard speaks about the parents of millennials (‘this generation…was raised with the highest standard of living in the history of the world’; ‘their parents were comfortably established in the middle class and could afford to satisfy their offspring’s every whim. And they did, in spades’). Sorry, dear Standard, *our* parents were living through the stress of SAPs, mass layoffs and general entropy and loss of hope. Ask them.
Which leads us to the millennials. Yes, they have much more in common as a generation across the globe, primarily because they can witness and, crucially, share experiences because of the wonders of the internet and social media. But are they more narcissistic and navel gazing? Are they more ‘woke’ as a generation? I think not. They are simply more visible, and able to broadcast their insecurities, fears, angst and vanities using tools unavailable to earlier generations. All of us wanted cars NOW soon into our first jobs, but the only people we could tell were our friends at the bar, not our 10,000 followers on Instagram. The ‘68 generation brought the West to a near-standstill, and protested the deployment of missiles in the 1980s, while students like Tito Adungosi were assassinated (how’s *that* for wokeness?)
These generations (‘millennials’/ ‘Gen Z’ etc.) are having their own unique experiences, powered by what is going on around them at a macro level, the advantages and anxieties of technology, and issues such as global and local politics, terrorism, climate change and pandemics. Generalising about (a) generation(s), and assuming that what is commented about them in America applies globally is simply lazy. These are (and are not) the first global generations. They are simply young people making their way in the world. Same as all previous generations.
Very interesting perspective. Made me unlearn some previous "truths"
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