Democracy, prosperity and self-rule – this was the vision of African independence. But today, few Africans express satisfaction with the fruits of uhuru. Those heady days of anti-colonial mobilization, demonstrations and demands, though only three decades old, seem now a dream from which one has awakened to another historical epoch. What went wrong?

For Western students of Africa, the disappointment is largely of our own making. Our expectations in the 1960s were too grand, too romantic and profoundly unfair. Surely, we thought, the sufferings of the African people would give birth to a new man, a man of virtue committed to collective betterment and democracy. But exploitation and powerlessness do not create any special virtue. Sceptics now, we endorse the novelist Ayi Kwei Armah's lament – ‘The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born’.

A more positive view is expressed by professional developmentalists employed by international agencies. Publicly, they speak of Africa's problems, but also of the ‘vast potential’ of nations bubbling with ‘the ferment of development’. Privately, however, they are generally less sanguine.