The sight of the leaders of several African countries arriving in Tokyo this week to demand that the leaders of the G8 honour their promises on aid, debt relief and trade prompts many competing thoughts. What is the purpose of this elite club of mostly rich nations, for a start? And are its promises worth the paper they are written on, given that all the hullabaloo surrounding the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where many of those promises were made, seems ultimately to have achieved so little? So much for the G8's heavily publicised pledge to “Make Poverty History”.

Besides, if there really is a need for a high-level global economic talking-shop, why is there not at least one representative from the economies of the “South” to sit formally at the conference table, rather than having to lobby ignominiously from the outside?

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A relatively warm hello

On the other hand, awful as the continent's problems are, from disease and poverty to its pockets of war and oppression, by going cap in hand to the G8 Africa's leaders may be sending the wrong message to the world. After all, even as the rest of the global economy slows down and some parts even flirt with recession, business in large parts of Africa is booming like never before. Despite the credit crunch in the rich world's financial markets, in sub-Saharan Africa in particular there is no sign of any reduction in a growth rate that has averaged over 5% a year for the past decade.

It is not just a case of Chinese and now Indian and Russian money gobbling up Africa's raw materials. At the start of this year, some 15 sub-Saharan African countries had stockmarkets, listing some 500 companies with tradable shares and a combined market capitalisation–excluding relatively mighty South Africa's–of $100 billion, according to a report from Goldman Sachs, “Africa Rising”. Since then, these markets have mostly soared ever higher, even as shares everywhere else have plunged to earth. The best performing stockmarket among this impressive bunch is Ghana's, up by one-third so far this year.

In April, the New York Stock Exchange even screened a bullish movie about business in Africa, with the misleadingly dull title, “Africa Investment horizons”. As the film-maker, Carol Pineau, pointed out in the Washington Post on July 6th, the continent is now “making inroads into manufacturing. The South Africans brag that if you drive a Hummer, you're driving a car made in Africa. Ditto if you drive a BMW with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. The next time you fly on a Boeing aircraft, look out the window and you'll see engines with parts made in South Africa. But that country isn't alone. I've seen factories in Lesotho that produce Gap and Old Navy clothing, car parts manufactured in Botswana and call centres in Kenya and Uganda.”

Certainly, there are risks that should be considered by any investor thinking of pulling his money out of China and India in search of the last big emerging-market thing. Events earlier this year in Kenya highlighted the continent's political fragility, as has the more recent failure to force a desperately needed change of leadership on inflation-ridden, impoverished and oppressed Zimbabwe. Perhaps even more ominously, lately there has been a worsening of mood among South African business leaders, black and white alike, as uncertainty grows about what political leadership will follow the years of drift over which the current president, Thabo Mbeki, has presided. No one has yet given up hope, not by any stretch of the imagination. But no one who cares about the economic prospects for the continent wants to see South Africa, having kept capitalism's candle burning in Africa for so long, dim its light even a little. On the other hand, there seem at last to be genuine signs of economic vitality in Africa's greatest long-term under-performer, Nigeria.

The bottom line: it is surely good for Africa and for everyone else that there is now an alternative to the old, depressing image of a hopeless continent. At last, the optimistic image of a continent starting to stand on its own feet is becoming plausible. Perhaps the African leaders visiting Tokyo this week stopped grumbling long enough to make that clear to their peers in the G8.