In May 2000, The Economist magazine ran a cover story: “Africa. The Hopeless Continent.” We couldn’t stop talking about it for a long while afterward. Africans were understandably pissed. It spawned countless op-eds about Afropessimism and Afro-optimism. By Afropessimism, we mean the perception of sub-Saharan Africa “as a region too riddled with problems for good governance and economic development;” Afro-optimism refers to the idea that conditions in Africa would improve through good governance and neoliberalism. The trouble with this discourse of course is that it is an over-general, basically circular conversation.

The article was a bit of a mess.

It opened with lines like “Mozambique and Madagascar have been deluged by floods, famine has started to reappear in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe has succumbed to government-sponsored thuggery, and poverty and pestilence continue unabated.” Basically, it threw together man-made and natural disasters as all contributing to this perceived hopelessness.

Much of the oped was about Sierra Leone, but as we used to say at the time: Africa is a country.

Then The Economist concluded: “These acts are not exclusively African—brutality, despotism and corruption exist everywhere—but African societies, for reasons buried in their cultures, seem especially susceptible to them.”

For reasons buried in their culture. They really said that.

Given the cultural influence of The Economist at the time, for a while the “Hopeless Continent” article became the basis around which many a “Contemporary African Politics” college course was organized. In cases, because the readers took the article at its word, while others took it as a provocation or foil.

Last week, more than eleven years later, The Economist ran a new cover: “Africa Rising.” It is like night and day. This one comes complete with silhouetted boy with multicolored diversity kite running across the savannah. Inside, the magazine predicts a more hopeful scenario for the continent’s 54 states.

This issue also comes with a glowing lead editorial. After listing a few negative features, the writer concludes that “Africa is at last getting a taste of peace and decent government.” Then there’s a three-page article, that comes with a trite conclusion: “Autocracy, corruption and strife will not disappear overnight. But at a dark time for the world economy, Africa’s progress is a reminder of the transformative promise of growth.”

The prescription then was that Africa needed more capitalism.  Sample from that article: “Governments should make it easier to start businesses and cut some taxes and collect honestly the ones they impose. Land needs to be taken out of communal ownership and title handed over to individual farmers so that they can get credit and expand.”

The most remarkable thing about this new Economist cover, is that it was a non-event. The problem for The Economist is that the media environment has changed: No one is waiting for The Economist’s verdict on anything anymore.

And you can read all this stuff somewhere else. whether on boosterist blogs or the countless tweets you have to mine through everyday about Africa Rising.

In any case, for people who measure Africa’s progress by how many dollar billionaires it has (and there are a few people who love this sort of thing), will be happy to hear that “the richest black person in the world” is not Oprah Winfrey and her $3 billion fortune: that only makes her “the wealthiest black person in America.” That honor goes to Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian cement king, whose wealth as we know has less to do with the unbridled capitalism the The Economist promotes and more to with how Dangote has harnessed the Nigerian state in his own interests.

We cannot wait for their next “Africa” cover.