In contemporary Kenya, “youth” identify as members of the “digital age” in contrast to “elders” who, young people lament, are woefully “analog.” Kenya is not unique in this, and the politics of generation animate public debate at sites across the continent today. But in Africa, as in the United States and across much of the world, the politics of generation in the contemporary moment have much deeper roots, reflecting durable historical dynamics of gender and class that we would likely miss if we limited our exploration to the present. In this course we will explore these longer histories by focusing on three regional zones—West/Central Africa, Southern Africa, and Eastern Africa. Over the course of the term we will explore how generation and gender have repeatedly emerged as the staging ground where economic, culture, and social transformations played out. Over the course of the term we will explore the slave trade, European colonialism and the integration of Africa into the capitalist world system, African societies’ responses and resistances to colonial rule, African nationalism and the challenges of decolonization, the cultural politics of “development” in postcolonial Africa, the AIDS epidemic, and the people’s pursuit of more desirable futures in the neoliberal present.