Bright continent: why Africa's success stories are too often overlooked.

• Author: Kristof, Nicholas D.
• Position: OPINION

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Mention Africa in polite company, and those around you may grimace, shake their heads sadly, and profess sympathy. Oh, all those wars! Those diseases! Those dictators!

Naturally, that attitude infuriates Africans themselves, since the conventional view of Africa as a genocide inside a failed state inside a dictatorship is, in fact, wrong.

In the last few years, Africa overall has enjoyed economic growth rates of approximately 5 percent (see chart), better than

in the United States (although population growth is also higher). Africa has even produced some especially vibrant economies, like Botswana and Rwanda, that show what the continent is capable of.

The bane of Africa is war, but the number of conflicts has dwindled (see Times Past, p. 24). Most of the murderous dictators like Idi Amin of Uganda are gone, and we're seeing the rise of skilled technocrats who accept checks on their power and don't regard the treasury as their private piggy bank. The Rwandan cabinet room is far more high-tech than the White House cabinet room, and when you talk to leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, you can't help wondering about investing in Liberian stocks.

"The media's problem is that, by covering only disasters and wars, it gives us only that image of the continent," writes Richard Dowden in Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. "Persistent images of starving children and men with guns have accumulated into our narrative of the continent."

Dowden faults aid organizations for helping to maintain the image of Africans as helpless victims of wars and famines.

"The aid industry too has an interest in maintaining the image of Africans as hopeless victims of endless wars and persistent famines," he continues. "However well intentioned their motives may once have been, aid agencies have helped create the single, distressing image of Africa. They and journalists feed off each other."

THE MEDIA'S ROLE

I've thought a lot about these issues, partly because I often write columns about war and disaster in Africa, from Darfur to Congo to AIDS in southern Africa. And it's discomfiting to feel that I'm helping Africa by exposing such catastrophes, and then have African leaders complain--as they do--that such reporting undermines their access to foreign investment and their ability to expand their economies and overcome poverty.

We in the news media and in the aid world can and should do a much better job providing context and...