Whenever I visit an African country, as I did recently on vacation in South Africa and Malawi, I am struck by two realities: the expansion of the middle classes and the endurance of poverty. I mostly mingle with family and friends belonging to the former and observe the latter from the safe and often discomforting distance of car rides with my well-endowed hosts, or as on my recent trip to Malawi on a visit to a village school where a family trust set up in memory of my late mother sponsors opharned children from the school who pass the national standard eight examinations to attend secondary schools. This only underscores the immense social diversity, complexity and contradictions of contemporary Africa, where the relatively rapid economic growth of recent years has lifted millions into the comforts of middle class consumption but has left millions more grinding in bare subsistence.

The story of the expanding African middle classes is hardly known outside the continent where Africa continues to be seen in the monotonous colors of grinding poverty. But collectively Africa has fewer poor people than Asia, its economy is larger than India's which has more people, and its rapidly growing middle classes are increasingly able to reproduce themselves in many ways, for one inter-generationally, and particularly intriguing in terms of emerging social imaginaries.

Unlike the small middle classes of my upbringing, the new and much larger middle classes are less tied to the public than the private sectors, simultaneously globalized and localized in their modernist attitudes, aspirations, and anxieties, comfortable with both their Africanness and worldliness, and far more confident of their capacities to remake the continent and its place in the world. Theirs is a condition and an imaginary best captured in the notion sometimes called Afropolitanism, which is evident most poignantly in the explosive consumption of cellphones, nollywood films, and the growth of transnational economic, cultural, political, and social flows and engagements across the continent.

The Africa of expanding and vibrant middle classes remains largely invisible not only to bigoted foreigners wedded to portrayals of irredeemable African backwardness, but among scholars committed to Fanon's famous suspicion of, indeed contempt for, the comprador bourgeoisies of the postcolonial world. It is too easy to dismiss this class, which today comprises more than a quarter of the African population, as bogus and undeserving, in the anthropologized language of cultural authenticity or the radical rhetoric of social vanguardism.

The veils of invisibility are slowly lifting for the African middle classes. Last September The Washington Post [1] discovered what it called Africa's "New Middle Income Consumerism." The story began, and continued, in parts:

Meet Denis Ruharo, an entrepreneur with a master's degree, a man who carries a BlackBerry [2] and two Nokia [3] cellphones, buys organic greens at a grocery store and sometimes does business over a cold Nile beer at a club called Silk.

"I have the mortgage and home improvement," he said, glancing at the budget he and his wife keep on their computer. "The car, carwash and parking tickets. Entertainment -- cable TV, two movies a month. The health club. Then normally we vacation twice a year. Last time it was Nairobi."

"What else," he said, scrolling down on his Mac PowerBook. "Newspapers, charity, clothes, books and CDs . . . "

In a region more often associated with grinding poverty, Ruharo is part of a modestly growing segment of sub-Saharan Africa -- upwardly mobile, low- to middle- income consumers....

Although the continent has always had a modest middle class made up mostly of government workers or others tied to the ruling elite, the middle ranks have begun to expand in recent years with private sector employees. They include secretaries, computer gurus, merchants and others who by virtue of education, geography or luck have benefited from economic growth of around 6 percent annually in such countries as Uganda, Ghana and Kenya, and around 8 percent in Rwanda. Increasingly, they are entrepreneurs such as Ruharo, who represents the wealthier end of the spectrum and whose company is an offshoot of the newly booming cellphone industry.

Though critics say the trickledown effect is meager, others credit leaders of those countries with adopting relatively sound economic policies that have allowed the private sector to expand, driving what analysts say is the highest level of consumer demand the continent has ever seen...

Vijay Mahajan, a business professor at the University of Texas in Austin [4], recently coined the phrase "Africa 2s" to describe people who are neither desperately poor (Africa 3s) nor obnoxiously rich (Africa 1s), and says the middle group is one of the most important drivers of economic growth in Africa.

"I'm convinced that Africa is going to be built by Africa 2s," said Mahajan, who has written a book, "Africa Rising," on the subject. "These are the people sending their kids to school . . . who are the most optimistic, the most forward-thinking."

Kenyan economist James Shikwati suggested that middle-income consumers are also a driving force for political change.

"It's empowering," he said. "If you give people a sense of freedom in the economic sector, then you deny it in the political sector, you have a problem."

Anver Versi, the editor of the influential business magazine, African Business [5], echoed the same sentiments in the November issue of the magazine, and tied the fortunes of this class to Africa's capacity to manage the global economic crisis and accelerate development and deepen democracy:

Despite the severe pessimism about the global economy following the extraordinary meltdown of the Western financial system (see this month's cover story), the outlook for Africa remains very bright. It is not so much that the continent has been growing at a healthy 6% per annum, but rather the manner of its growth. While high oil and commodity prices have certainly helped, the real growth has been organic, in that it has been locally generated.

Africa no longer sees itself merely as a supply source for the economies of Asia and Europe, but as a strong emerging market in its own right. Some will quibble about the definition of Africa as an emerging market, but remember we are talking of a continent here, not single countries like India or Brazil and, on a continental average, Africa is the 10th-largest economy in the world. The point is that Africa has now entered a new, natural phase of its development whereby local people and companies are getting on with the business of life. They are making and selling products that they want in a manner that is most appropriate for each market. They are taking ownership of their own economic destiny. This is the first step towards wealth creation and, therefore, poverty alleviation. All advanced regions have gone through the same processes at different stages of history - although the transition from rural-based subsistence to urban industrialisation has been far quicker in Africa than everywhere else....

From a marketing perspective, Africa's population is a consumer pyramid divided into three tiers according to disposable income. Tier 1 is the upper-class market with 50m to 150m people; tier 2 is the middle classes who number 150m to 300m; and tier 3 is the 300m+ who form the pyramid's base. Researchers have noticed that the movement of people from the bottom tier to the second tier, and upward mobility within tier 2, is accelerating - irrespective of the level of literacy involved. In short, people are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and they are convinced that anything is possible. The fact that large numbers of people from tier three have made a success of their lives in business, politics and sports is proof positive that social mobility in Africa is not frozen....

This movement will accelerate for three main reasons - one, the expansion of banking, which is already formalising hitherto informal enterprises; two, the ease of over-border trade as regional economic blocks gradually reduce barriers to movement and commerce; and, finally, because of the mobile phone. This last device could have been invented specially for Africa. It makes nonsense of geographical limitations and has become the main conduit of information in a region that is still largely illiterate. It has opened up vast horizons of activities and Africans have been very quick to test its entire scope.

Most of the growth has come not because of government intervention or aid or the activity of NGOs, but often despite them. As in the early stages of the US, local entrepreneurs want less government, not more. They want governments to provide common goods such as roads, power, security, reliable legal systems and regulatory mechanisms, and then let them get on with it. The best government is an invisible government. As Africa's middle classes grow, and as their taxes form larger tranches of government coffers, there is a corresponding increase in demands made on government services. This is how it should be. The government role is to provide a good environment in which business and entrepreneurship can take place. The era of big, all-powerful and unaccountable governments is gone - and thank God for that. Government is elected to serve the public, not the other way round as some of our governments seem to think.

It is time for scholars to take the African middle classes and study their growth and expansion in all their complexities and contradictions a lot more seriously than they have done hitherto, for these classes are critical to the continent's processes and prospects for development, democratization, and self-determination, the three historic and humanistic agendas of African nationalism. Together with the more celebrated peasantries and workers they are indispensable to Africa's future.