Accelerating with the turn of the millennium, the study of where Africa ‘is’, and where it is ‘going’, has blossomed into a cottage industry of pan-African polemics. It is among such works that Africa's Moment is decidedly at home. Taking urban population growth as their starting point, Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray outline the nascent ‘great African upheaval’ (3) and map its potentialities. Unfortunately, the result is a series of thematic sketches that adds little to an already-cramped debate.

Severino and Ray venture many reasonable predictions, for instance where they forewarn the danger of ecological mismanagement and anticipate a continued surge in religiosity. Yet such vast claims are consistently delivered on thin evidence. Broad assumptions are followed by a barrage of factoids – ‘the 124 kilowatt-hours that an average African consumes each year are scarcely enough to power a 100-watt bulb for three hours a day’ (201) – with scant attention given to the scholarly literature. This frequently results in shaky analysis. The Rwandan genocide is ascribed to growing tensions over land (183), while large-N macro-economic indicators alone lead the authors to proclaim that ‘structural adjustment did succeed’ (79).

Troubling Africa's Moment throughout, such questionable conclusions result from a narrative utterly devoid of politics. Steady growth in Mozambique and Burkina Faso is explained as due to these countries’ leaders having ‘avoided the mistakes’ of unsound social and economic policies (168), in contrast to what the reader must presume were the honest errors of, for instance, Abacha and Amin. Even conflict and criminality are stripped of their surroundings: violence is explained as the product of anomie, ‘a form of revenge against a stifled destiny’ that is ‘the only way of explaining’ rape, torture and child soldiering (106). Here, as throughout the work, all-important political context is ignored amid impossibly wide assertions. This tendency to essentialise is particularly problematic where the authors’ sweeping generalisations encroach on one another. Most notably, the fifth chapter ends with admonitions against ‘reductionist’ explanations for economic stagnation, notably geographic and cultural fatalism. The ‘African tragedy’, the reader is rightly told, ‘is a tenacious myth’ (63). Immediately following this apt critique, however, the sixth chapter brings the claim that fifty years of stalled growth are ‘only a banal tragedy of economic cycles’ (64). Successive crises of rich-country debt and commodity shocks supposedly vitiated all African agency; ‘no country, no people could have grown and developed’ (75) in the latter decades of the twentieth century, despite the authors’ acknowledgment elsewhere that Botswana and other developing countries, particularly in East Asia, did so. After assiduously picking apart arguments that depict Africa as a hapless victim of circumstance, Severino and Ray thus happily embrace their own variant of determinism.

Forward-looking analyses of continental trends have an important place in the academy. Disappointingly, however, Severino and Ray attempt too much with too little evidence, resulting in numerous unsupportable claims. Rarely are such large hats hung on pegs so small.