Africa First! Igniting a Growth Revolution: by Jakkie Cilliers, Cape Town & Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2020, 379 pp., ZAR250 (paperback), ISBN 9781776190300

Africa First! is an informative, accessible and important tour de force of the key demographic, educational, technological and political drivers of Africa's current economy and future prospects. Jakkie Cilliers begins the analysis by describing a recurring pattern: across numerous sectors, Africa has been doing better – a growing economy, declining levels of extreme poverty and increasing access to information technology, to name just three. The positive changes, however, are not accumulating quickly enough, and the gap between Africa and the rest of the world has widened rather than narrowed. Moreover, using econometric projections based on current economic, demographic, technological and educational trends developed by the International Futures (IF) project at the University of Denver, Cilliers forecasts a widening gap – a scenario referred to in the rest of the book as the ‘current path’.