1990, Africans in most of the 46 black-ruled nations below the Sahara were poorer

than they had been 30 years before Yet all is not misery. As philoso- pher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes here, Africans in their
disillusionment have cast ' i
aside the shallow national-ism of the early postcolonial years. They are holding their societies together with old bonds of family and i tribe, and, increasingly,

with new bonds, spun i!
churches, sports clubs, and other groups. These humble grassroots in...