Africa has endured an economic catastrophe that dwarfs the Great Depression. Starting from stark poverty, it descended during the past decade into unbelievable deprivation. Famine, war, and civil strife became commonplace, and even AIDs was visited upon the Africans. By 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 philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes here, Africans in their disillusionment...