Aspirational Anxiety: Hope and Frustration in Youth Future Talk in Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa

This article offers empirical insight into the hopes and frustrations attendant to aspiration expressed by young adults in Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa, all countries characterised by significant diversity. This contributes to understanding youth orientations towards the future, which is being shaped by rising consumerism and climate disaster. The theoretical framework considers the tension between aspiration and the Anthropocene, showing how economic development and climate survival are interconnected in African futures. The article presents empirical detail from interviews with young Black Africans (18–25) in urban settings that took place in 2022 and 2023. The participants expressed a complex mix of hope and frustration in relation to economic opportunity, seeing their future opportunities as curtailed by inequality and governance failure. They were hesitant to discuss climate worry, seemingly seeing environmental issues as separate to the economic, despite realities about how climate change will impact prospects for life improvement. I call the state of these conflicting ideas held in one discourse “aspirational anxiety” and theorise this as a key component of diversity in that it illuminates how economic agency interacts with climate anxiety in African contexts.