Afrikki forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that Africa’s protest movements often spring from problems so persistent they begin to feel ancestral.
By Joseph Jonathan
During my undergraduate studies in History and International Studies, one of the topics that intrigued me the most was the Arab Spring, the series of anti-government uprisings, demonstrations, and revolutions that swept across North Africa and the Middle East beginning in late 2010. It was a moment in world history when youthful anger, social media organising, and widespread disillusionment collided to reshape long-standing power structures.
While the Arab Spring might seem far away, youth uprisings such as Burkina Faso’s Balai Citoyen, DR Congo’s LUCHA movement, the EndSARS protests in Nigeria, and the #FeesMustFall in South Africa, hit close to home. The African continent has always had its own vocabulary for resistance, its own rhythms of dissent.
It is into this lineage that Afrikki, a documentary feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Gaëlle Le Roy, positions itself. And rightly so. Because at its core, Afrikki is not simply a historical recounting of a protest movement. It is an attempt to map a genealogy of African youth resistance: a cinematic blueprint for understanding how frustration evolves into consciousness, and how consciousness evolves into collective action.
Le Roy goes into the heart of Dakar to tell the story of one of Senegalʼs most defining civic movements: Y’En A Marre (translated loosely as “enough is enough”. Formed in 2011 after one too many power outages — that was the final straw — the movement began as a spontaneous expression of anger and then transformed into a symbol of civic responsibility, cultural awakening, and Pan-African solidarity.
The movement was founded by a group of friends, rappers, and journalists who refused to remain silent in the face of corruption and political stagnation. Their ethos was simple but radical: “There is no foreclosed destiny, there are only abandoned responsibilities.”
From the very beginning, the film portrays Y’En A Marre not just as a protest group but as an ideological movement. Over ten years of filming across Dakar, Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, Goma, Douala, and Nairobi, Le Roy traces how the Senegalese uprising gradually blossomed into a continental network of youth activists — a movement now known as Afrikki.
One of the film’s earlier scenes uses archival footage accompanied by a voice-over from one of Y’En A Marre’s leaders detailing the frustrations that birthed the collective. As he narrates how power outages disrupted daily life in Dakar, there is a sharp, almost painful recognition.
Watching that moment, I felt a sense of unease, even disappointment, not at the film, but at the cyclical nature of African governance. The grievances of 2011 are the grievances of 2025. The same flickering lights, the same fragile infrastructure, the same empty promises. Power outages continue to plague the continent, almost as if nothing has changed.
In this sense, Le Roy’s documentary becomes unintentionally reflective: it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that Africa’s protest movements often spring from problems so persistent they begin to feel ancestral.
But Afrikki does something more than recount outrage. Part of what the film achieves is a thoughtful examination of how grassroots orientation and civic education shaped the durability of Y’En A Marre. It demonstrates that it is not enough to gather in the streets with placards and chants. Lasting political change depends on sustained ideological work; on teaching citizens their rights, responsibilities, and the mechanics of governance. Through classroom workshops, community dialogues, and cultural events, the movement created a civic ecosystem capable of outlasting the adrenaline of protest.
In a continent where many well-intentioned civil actions are easily derailed, hijacked, or manipulated by political opportunists, Afrikki positions education as the antidote: the grounding force that keeps collective anger focused rather than flammable.
It shows why the most successful African protest movements invest as much in voter literacy, constitutional awareness, and community organising as they do in demonstrations. Le Roy’s camera lingers on these quiet moments — the teaching, the mentoring, the strategising — reminding us that revolutions, at least sustainable ones, are built in classrooms as much as on streets.
Cinematically, the documentary is alive with movement. The camera travels from Dakar’s energy to the fires of Ouagadougou, from the tense optimism of Kinshasa to the charged streets of Nairobi. These transitions are not merely geographical; they underscore the film’s central argument that Africa’s youth share a common frustration and a common dream of a continent capable of more than its postcolonial fate. Yet the film stops short of romanticising this solidarity. Instead, it presents a grounded, sometimes chaotic ecosystem of activists negotiating real political risks, ideological disagreements, and the emotional toll of resistance.
One of the most striking things about Afrikki is its honesty about fatigue, both personal and political. Movements age. Leaders grow weary. Governments retaliate. Funding dries up. Hope wavers. And yet, even as Le Roy captures the disillusionment and exhaustion, she also captures the stubbornness that keeps these movements alive. Y’En A Marre’s leaders articulate a story of protest not as an event but as a lifelong commitment. That framing alone elevates the documentary beyond reportage and into something closer to political meditation.
But perhaps the film’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to treat African youth activism as something accidental or reactionary. Instead, it frames movements like Y’En A Marre within a broader intellectual tradition anchored in protest music, poetry, journalism, community organising, and cultural identity. Hip-hop, in particular, becomes a recurring motif, not as entertainment but as an ideological tool. Rappers become political philosophers. Lyrics become manifestos. Beats become battlegrounds.
Le Roy doesn’t overplay this, but she never lets us forget that art — especially youth art — has always been central to African political awakening. The film understands what many news reports often ignore: that African revolutions frequently begin with metaphors, not machetes.
If Afrikki falters anywhere, it is in its occasional lack of narrative tension. Because the documentary spans over a decade and covers multiple countries, some transitions feel abrupt, and some storylines lose their emotional grip just as they begin to form. The film’s ambition is vast, perhaps even too vast for a single documentary. But these shortcomings do little to undermine the importance of what Le Roy attempts here.
Ultimately, Afrikki is an important film and a necessary one at that. In an era when African youth movements are too often flattened into hashtags or reduced to moments of online trendiness, this documentary insists on the long view. It insists that activism is history-making work. It insists that anger can be constructive when given structure, ideology, and community. And it insists that the future of the continent rests, quite literally, in the hands of those willing to take responsibility for it.
More importantly, the film serves as a reminder — to policymakers, to young Africans, to the global community — that no country or continent is destined to stagnation. As Y’En A Marre consistently argues, and as Afrikki reinforces with clarity and conviction: “There is no foreclosed destiny. There are only abandoned responsibilities.”
And perhaps that is the most radical thesis of all.
Rating: 3.2/5
*Afrikki was the opening film at the International Documentary Film Festival, Saint-Louis (Stlouis’DOCS) 2025 where it won the Critics Prize Special Mention before screening at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival (ENIFF) 2025.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.