Two

Two, the politics of generation shift is often based on a wrong notion of a linear progression from one generation to another. Frantz Fanon, in his over- quoted ‘message to the youths of Africa’, contributed to this misconception when he declared: “Every generation out of its relative obscurity discovers its mission, fulfils it or betrays it”. The truth is that every generation embodies something from the preceding generation, something it wishes to do differently from its forebears and also nostalgia for some values it wishes it could recapture from the previous generation. In this sense, Wole Soyinka was probably too hard on his generation when he declared it a ‘wasted generation’ because despite its failures, it recorded achievements in a number of areas – in literature, the sciences and in consolidating the notion of Nigeria as a country on a journey to nationhood. Before that generation, the basis of the different nationalities that make up the country being together was more sharply contested