The optimism that greeted African independence in 1960 seems incongruous today. Then, few Western observers doubted that Africa would develop rapidly, and many made favorable comparisons between the prospects of African countries like Ghana and those of Asian countries like Korea, which in 1956 enjoyed roughly the same economic level. Most Western observers believed that African countries would build rapid industrialization through revenues provided by handsome prices for the primary commodities of the region. Anticipating a continuation of the Korean War commodities boom, few observers anticipated the volatility and downward trend that primary commodities would undergo in the 1960s and especially 1970s. More crucially, they did not view manpower constraints as particularly onerous and tended to be impressed with leaders like Nkrumah or Nyerere, who were generally believed to be capable of great things. In retrospect, the capacity of foreign aid to promote economic growth and build effective public institutions was greatly overestimated.

At the end of what is a fairly pessimistic account of Africa's contemporary political economy, it may be useful to remember how wrong these earlier outside observers have proved to be. I hope that this account, too, has missed a key trend or a critical new development, which will in time prove my pessimism to be unwarranted.