On a continent where nearly 40 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen, scholars, policymakers, politicians, and adults cannot afford to continue to ignore African youth—a substantial and ever-growing segment of the African population and, indeed, the global youth population, which currently stands at 1.2 billion people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. As this bulging African youth population becomes more educated and media savvy, they are poised to become the next generation of leaders throughout Africa and the world. Understanding how populations of African youth see, observe, and engage with the world around them, especially through the production of culture, might offer scholars important insights not only into this generation's lives and experiences but also about the broader processes of social and cultural change taking place in Africa.

Many scholars engaging with youth in Africa have found the arts to be useful in understanding the unique experiences of youth cultures across the continent. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars have found African youth utilizing the arts to articulate their conflicted postcolonial positionality and making sense of their global identity. Consistently, scholars of youth culture are seeing youth utilize music as a medium to contest social norms and/or express their individual and cultural identity in a globalized world. Often the message portrayed is politically driven, but in other cases it is simply a tool to amplify the voices, desires, and experiences of a generation.

But the voices, thoughts, and experiences of a specific population of youth have consistently been silenced or omitted from much literature on contemporary African youth culture—namely street children. In the context of Africa, where there are tens of millions of street children roaming its city streets, it is crucial that we gain a sense of how this population sees and engages with the world. Being an important segment of African youth culture that is little known, the broader topic of street children has gained uncharted momentum in academia. However, limited scholarship has investigated how this population makes and utilizes the arts in everyday life, specifically popular music. Since street children draw upon the music and culture surrounding them, it is essential to consider the experiences of street children who often dwell in the same urban spaces as their colleagues with shelter and undergo similar struggles surrounding postcolonial positionality and individual identity.