Young Africans born in the 1980s and early 1990s enjoy neither the same education nor the same employment opportunities as their fathers and mothers. In the past 20 years economic inequality between Africa and the rest of the world has increased. In the context of the new economic conditions created in part by economic liberalization, national education systems can no longer provide young people with the adult social status that they desire. Global consumer capitalism and new technologies spread their influences ever deeper into African daily life, while competition for scarce resources and civil conflict fuels social disruption and war. These circumstances compel young people to forge new paths to the future and new ways to be adult. This article considers recent work on youth in Africa, and particularly urban Africa, to argue for a view of generational change as characterized by a conjuncture between young people coming of age, on the one hand, and existing social, cultural, and economic arrangements on the other--what the author is calling a dialect of generational change. The author's conception of generational change draws from, and elaborates on, both Karl Mannheim's (1927/1993) seminal ideas on the nature of generations and the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1992).