The Case Against Afropessimism

Afropessimism rarely announces itself by that name. It usually arrives dressed as realism, the tired voice in the room that has seen enough coups and corruption scandals to know better than to hope for much. I want to take that voice seriously instead of dismissing it, because some of what it points to is true.

The Second Congo War killed an estimated 5.4 million people between 1998 and 2003.¹ Zimbabwe's hyperinflation reached 79.6 billion percent at its peak.² Darfur displaced roughly 2.5 million people.³ Thirty eight percent of college educated Africans were living abroad by 2010, and the medical sector was hit hardest of all.⁴ I am not going to pretend any of that did not happen, or that it is somehow balanced out by good news elsewhere. Grief does not work on a ledger like that.

But here is where I think the pessimist's case actually fails, not on the facts, but on what it does with them. It treats those facts as a verdict on the future instead of a description of the past and present. A verdict assumes nothing can be built from here. A description just tells you where you are standing.

So let me describe where we are standing, using numbers the pessimist case rarely puts on the same page as the ones above.

Africa holds close to thirty percent of the world's mineral reserves, roughly twelve percent of global oil reserves, and close to forty percent of the world's gold deposits.⁵ The continent contains an estimated sixty percent of the world's remaining uncultivated arable land, at the exact moment global food security is becoming a generational problem.⁵ The working age population is projected to reach 1.2 billion by 2050, while almost every other major region, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, faces a shrinking and ageing workforce.⁶ The African Continental Free Trade Area, functioning as designed, creates a single market of 1.3 billion people with a combined economy of roughly 3.4 trillion dollars.⁷

None of that cancels the war, the inflation, the displacement, the doctors who left. It sits next to it. Both sets of facts are true about the same continent at the same time, which is exactly the kind of complexity I think Afropessimism, like its mirror image Africa Rising, is built to avoid having to hold.

What I am actually arguing against is the idea that despair is the more rigorous, more adult position, and hope is the soft one that has not done its homework. I think it is the opposite, more often than people admit. Despair lets you stop. It asks nothing further of you once you have decided the case is closed. Continuing to look at the resource base, the demographics, the trade architecture, and ask what could actually be done with all of it, that takes more discipline, not less, because you do not get to use the bad news as a reason to stop thinking.

I am not asking anyone to feel optimistic. Feelings are not really the point. I am asking whether the arithmetic, taken completely, points toward a closed case or an open one. I have done the arithmetic as honestly as I know how, including the parts that hurt to write. I keep landing on open.