I define what a protest wave is and reflect on the concept’s analytic value. I then highlight significant moments in all three African protest waves: the late colonial period from around 1940 to 1960, the uprisings leading to democratic transitions in the 1990s, and the most recent spike in unrest at the start of the twenty-first century. The last wave stands out in terms of the substantial involvement of poor people, which I elucidate in later chapters on protest leadership and participation. To avoid selecting on the dependent variable, Chapter 2 includes a section on the “missing wave” of protests in the 1970s and 1980s when popular grievances ran high but authoritarian controls resulted in fewer protests than scholars expected to see. Beyond narrating more than eighty years of African protests, I apply sociological theories to understand why certain moments in history become protest waves.