Two Roads Divurged: Mengestu's story The Paper Revolution in current New Yorker

The New Yorker is on a bit of a roll now with another good story this week, Dinaw Mengestu's The Paper Revolution, a first-person account of a time - not sure how far in the past - when young African intellectuals flocked to Kampala, Uganda, which was in a post-colonial, proto-socialist state and had looked and hoped to be the cultural, political, and academic center of the continent. The narrator, who adopts the name Langston (after Hughes, whom he notes he hadn't read but who had attended a writer's conference of note), is one of many completely impoverished young people, men exclusively I think, who hung around the university and more or less posed as students just to be involved in the activism and to get a dusting of knowledge by proximity. Mengestu does a great job describing the poverty in which these young men lived, their frustrated aspirations, and their despair. Langston befriends another would-be revolutionary, Isaac, who lodges a much deeper contempt for the wealthy young men who attend the university and flaunt their privileges. The guys realize they can tell the actual students by their shoes, and even by the way they walk and stand. The two launch a revolution of their own, papering the campus with weird manifestos that challenge the government, which leads, predictably, to a violent repression and then a martyrdom, or at least a heroism. Story ends on an ambiguous note, as Isaac becomes a leader in a student uprising (even though not a student) and Langston, seemingly, turns another way. It's very much a "road not taken" story - Langston's aspirations, as his name evinces, are literary - he emulates the writers of Africa and elsewhere, even though the action is campus politics, and eventually takes his own course. I have no idea if any of this story is autobiographical, but even if not Mengestu has captured the mood and feeling that so many young, aspiring writers and artists have felt, lived through, in their youths - not only in post-Colonial Africa but everywhere - a story both particular to its time and place and universal in its mood and insights.