SIXTH BOOK: “The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa”

For our sixth book, we are reading “The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa” by Dayo Olopade.

The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves.

Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. So, she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges.

Africa is a continent on the move. It’s often hard to notice, though—the Western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the past decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She discovered an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders.

Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty—a trait she began calling kanju. She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and young social entrepreneurs, driven by kanju. It’s a trait found in and embodied by pioneers and bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multimillion-dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief.

The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad government and bad aid into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

A shining counterpoint to the conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa’s challenges as opportunities to innovate and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world.

“A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise.” —New York Times Book Review

"For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start." —Reuters

"[An] upbeat study of development in Africa...The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension." —The New Yorker

[Overview and descriptions from Barnes and Noble and Amazon]