Let us pause for a moment to think about ways to grasp the timing of change during the decades after World War II. A narrative of “triumph and failure,” of “hope and disillusionment,” captures something of the time. It calls attention to the struggle for independence, the joy of seeing colonial rule end, and the subsequent despair at the inability of independent African states to sustain peace, democracy, and economic and social progress. The crisis that hit the Congo within weeks of independence in 1960, the coup that overthrew the pioneer of nationalism, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966, and the Biafran war of 1967–70 mark political turning points. By the late 1960s Africa’s leading intellectuals were calling attention to moral corruption and political passivity in the wake of earlier hopes. Some scholars began to argue that independence was an illusion: the new states of Africa were “neo-colonial,” politically sovereign, but economically dependent and lacking in cultural self-confidence.

In 2000 a cover story in The Economist was entitled “Hopeless Africa.” In 2011 a cover story in the same journal read “Africa Rising.” In 2016 a New York Times headline read, “‘Africa Rising’? ‘Africa reeling’ may be a more fitting slogan these days.” In each of these instances the journalist made two of the most elementary errors in the social sciences: turning a partially valid point into a false generalization and looking at the future as a linear projection of the recent past. Looking back at Africa between 1940 and the present, one sees major differences across space and across time. In a continent that contains different ecological zones, different connections to the outside world, nearly fifty distinct nation-states in its sub-Saharan regions alone, varied languages and belief systems, and different historical trajectories, it is hardly surprising that Africa should not share a single fate. Yet in the eyes of much of the outside world – and in many African eyes too – Africa is a singular entity, defined by different criteria: by race, by a colonial past, by poverty. Such visions have gone along with the idea that Africa should follow, or should have followed, a singular path through time, whether it is called development, modernization, or liberation.

Looking backward from the 1960s, it is easy to see why the story of post-war politics is often told as if everything led to a single, inevitable outcome: national independence. It is more difficult to see what somebody in 1945 or 1947 – say, a young, politically minded African returning from higher education abroad – aspired to and expected to attain. Or a family who had just settled in a mining town after years of periodic separations, missed the familiar sociability of village life but perhaps not the constraints of their elders, and hoped that their children could obtain an education. Or a farmer, selling his cocoa in the booming world market, aware that colonial marketing boards were holding onto much of what his crops earned, and wondering if his children would continue to help with the harvest.