Political Economy Analysis

Afro-optimism offers a comforting promise that Africa's moment is coming, despite it all, and that everything will be fine. But a mood is not a plan. From the GDP growth in the 2000s to the quiet rise of a new economic neocolonialism, the "Africa Rising" narrative has benefited investors and capital markets better than the populations it claimed to celebrate. The question worth sitting with is whether Afro-optimism ever graduated from sentiment into strategy or whether it was always the story we told ourselves while the hard work went undone.