This essay argues that The Old Drift (2019), the debut novel of the Zambian-American author Namwali Serpell, can be read as a postcolonial coming-of-age novel, perhaps even as a novel that engages with the coming-of-age of postcolonial writing. The plot follows multiple generations of three families with different backgrounds, tracing connections between them as the characters age, while narrativizing the growing pains of a young nation. While The Old Drift can be read as a work of historiographic metafictionhistoriographic metafiction, I examine its systemic structure—its intersecting narratives, recurring events, and the dialogue it stages between multiple generations—to demonstrate how it constructs “age” in different ways. As such, I suggest that Serpell recycles the tropes of postcolonial fiction and carries them into the twenty-first century.