Young Lions

"The Young Patriots represent a new kind of African success story. They’re celebrated by many young people in Abidjan for beating and cheating a system gone rancid. With the corrupt 'old fathers' refusing to get out of the way, and with all the old channels to success—emigration, foreign study, state employment, family connections—blocked, the new hero is a young trickster with a talent for self-promotion. The model is no longer the formal bureaucratic style of the French colonizer; it’s the loud, unrestrained style that everyone in Ivory Coast calls American." Wrote George Packer in the The New Yorker in 2003.

As Packer notes: "the Young Patriot leaders, local stars in their twenties who were dressed like American hip-hop singers: gold chains, tracksuits, floppy hats. Their scowling bodyguards sat behind them, wearing muscle shirts and mirror glasses; a few were armed with Kalashnikov rifles. Sitting quietly and pathetically in the back rows were the neighborhood elders. In the traditional hierarchy of African villages, the old are elaborately deferred to by the young. Here the elders had no role other than to applaud while the Young Patriots took turns swaggering and jigging out on the speaker’s platform and the loudspeakers blasted reggae or zouglou, the homegrown pop music of the movement."

Five years later Young Patriots leader Charles Blé Goudé and once rebel leader Guillaume Soro who led the Patriotic Movement of Côte d'Ivoire and later the New Forces have suited up and transformed themselves into a savvy politicians, who play leading roles in Ivoirian politics.

A few days after Soro's 36th Birthday we look at the rise of a new generation of young lions in African politics.

See the Al Jazeera special report, An Ivorian miracle? here.