The so-called middle class appears to be a “muddling class”. Rigorously explored differentiation remains largely absent – not to mention any substantial class analysis. Fortunately, though, the debate has created sufficient awareness among scholars to explore the fact and fiction of the assumed transformative power of a middle class.

As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hold their Spring meetings in Washington, DC, billions of dollars due to African nations are illicitly leaving the continent.

Some arguments made today on why Africa cannot catch up with the West were also made 100 years ago when Africa was under European colonization, with the colonizers blaming everything but imperialism as the root cause of underdevelopment. The world economic structure has not changed, no matter the rhetoric of globalization. Africa remains semi-colonial: increasingly dependent on developed countries for overvalued manufactured goods while exporting raw materials at prices determined by commodity markets in the West.

A major claim of the purveyors of the ‘Africa rising’ narrative is the expansion of the African middle classes. Africanist scholarship has built upon this narrative, placing heavy emphasis upon such key issues as definition, consumption and the fragility of the ‘new’ middle classes across the continent. This book, the latest such offering amidst a burgeoning literature, confirms this trend, and is set to become a standard work of reference.

Development capacitation through local resource exploitation, mass industrial production and domestic prosperity-generation is what Africa requires to become the self-actuated mover of its own development  that does not depend on the vagaries of external demand for primary commodities. But sometimes even such initiatives are resisted by anti-African development leaderships.