Well, I’m out out of sync again. Back in 2012, just before the Economist was hyping the new African miracle, I wrote a very pessimistic post about the future of Africa, basically predicting a Camp of the Saints scenario.

Now, when more skepticism is being voiced about that miracle, and ships filled with African refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean, I decided to write a relatively more upbeat piece about the continent’s future. But the core reason for writing it are basically the same: numbers matter. And whether Africa becomes an economic colossus or a Malthusian tragedy, African is going to matter – because it is getting really, really huge:

Africa is the largest place on earth that it is possible, most of the time, to ignore. It won’t be forever. The journalistic cliché is that, as the 20th was the American century, the 21st will be the Chinese. But there is a plausible case to be made that, within a few short decades, we’ll be talking instead about the African century.

The reason is simple arithmetic. Demographically, Africa is expanding at a rate unmatched by any other remotely comparable region. Of the 25 countries with the highest total fertility rates, all but two (Afghanistan and East Timor) are African—and included in that list are some of Africa’s largest and most populous countries, such as Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to the UN’s population projections, Africa’s population will triple between 2000 and 2050, going from roughly 800 million to roughly 2.4 billion. It will then nearly double between 2050 and 2100, to 4.2 billion. At the end of the century, Africa is projected to have nearly as many people as all of Asia, and roughly as many as the entire world did in 1980. Nearly two out of every five people on earth in 2100 will be African.

You can read the whole thing on Politico’s website here.