The fifth generation

The Heir

A child born in 2060. Thirty-four years from now. I will be fifty-nine. Show me her.

Africa

She is born in a hospital where the power did not fail during the night, because the grid has three sources and a second company would have been fined if it had. Her birth is registered on a phone. Her mother was not afraid, because one child in a hundred now dies before five, not one in six, and the health worker who visited the house last week was paid on time.

She learns to read in her own language first, in a classroom with a book of her own and a teacher who was coached, and in her fourth year she can read, because the method that gave Kenya one extra year of learning in 2015 was copied by forty countries. In her history lesson she learns about Great Zimbabwe and Lalibela and Timbuktu, and about the first generation and the second, by name, with the dates, including the bad ones, because the One is taught in her school the way Europe teaches its own wars: as the thing that must not come back.

The Heir

And the president?

Africa

She does not know his name. That is the whole point. He is a man who was elected, who will leave in a few years, whose face is not on the money and not on the walls. The last president lost an election and went home, as the one before did, and the one before that, and it was not news. When she is eight the ruling party loses, and the house is tense for a day, and then it is not. She will grow up thinking that this is simply what countries do.

The Heir

The prices.

Africa

Her mother buys cement from one of four companies and fuel from one of six, and when one raises its price the others do not. There is a court her uncle took a ministry to, and won. There are forty radio stations in her city and two of them hate the governor, and the governor is still there and so are they. When she is twelve a man tries to remove the term limit, and the court says no, and the imams say no, and the students say no, and it does not happen, and it is in the newspaper for a week and then it is not.

The Heir

And the money? Does it still leave?

Africa

Less. Because the thing that made it leave was never greed alone; it was that a man could take it and no one could ask. When the budget is online and the court is real and the press is many, the money that still leaves is honest money, going to buy a machine abroad, and it comes back as a factory. Her father works in one. He is one of the twelve million who got the job because her parents' generation decided to be employers before they were voters.

The Heir

And the war?

Africa

She has never seen a soldier in the street who was not directing traffic. Her country's borders are open to every African, as Rwanda's and Ghana's were first, and when she is sixteen she takes a train to a neighbouring capital for a football match and nobody asks for a visa. Her cousin in the diaspora came home, because the first generation that stayed built a country worth coming back to.

The Heir

That is a beautiful picture. It is also a picture of a country that does not exist.

Africa

Every line of it exists somewhere on my soil tonight. One child in a hundred: Mauritius, Seychelles, Tunisia. The president nobody fears: Botswana, Ghana, Cape Verde. The four cement companies: Nigeria, after 2015. The court that said no: Malawi, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa. The forty radio stations: Ghana. The open border: Rwanda, Benin, Ghana. The train: Addis to Djibouti, Nairobi to Mombasa. The factory: Lekki, Hawassa, Tangier. I have not described a country that does not exist. I have described a country assembled from pieces that do, each of them cut by a generation that was told it could not be done here. Your task is not to invent. It is to assemble.

The Heir

And what does she think of us? Of my generation?

Africa

Nothing. That is the measure of your success. She will not know your names. She will think the locks were always there, the way a Swiss child thinks the trains were always on time. She will never have to be great, because you were. Mandela said it to a generation in a London square: sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. He did not say it falls on every generation. It fell on the first, and they won the flags and built the One. It fell on the third, and they did half the job. It has fallen on you, and the task is the strangest in history: to be the last generation that has to be great, so that the fifth can be ordinary.

The Heir

The last generation that has to be great.

Africa

The fourth generation's success is measured by the fifth never having to be. That is the sentence. Write it on the wall of the room you rent.

The Heir

You asked me at the beginning why I should bother. I notice you never answered in one line.

Africa

Because you already own it. Because the One is a lock and locks are cut. Because thirty-one proofs say it has been done here. Because every faith and custom you come from already contains the ruler who must answer. Because a child born in 2060 will take for granted whatever you decide to build. And because, when you are fifty-nine, you will either be listening to a radio tell you that a man has rewritten a constitution to stay, knowing which key was missing and who could have cut it, or you will be sitting in a country where that news is impossible, and no one will thank you, and that will be the proof.

The Heir

Then I will start with a circle. Twelve people, a vote I can lose.

Africa

That is how every lock on my soil was cut. Twelve people and a vote you can lose. Go. The seat beside you is open. Whoever reads this and writes to Atlas with what their country's first missing key is, under their own name and their own town, opens the next sitting.