In an article in the latest issue of Granta entitled "How to Write about Africa," Binyavanga Wainaina sarcastically advises would-be journalists and authors to write as though the continent is a single primordial entity, complete with bare-chested noble savages, destitute but jolly.

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country," he writes. "Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular."

In her recent essay in the New York Times, titled "Misery loves optimism in Africa," Lydia Polgreen commits this exact folly, along with many others that would likely make Wainaina cringe.

Polgreen cobbles together a recent Gallup International study with some anecdotes to create a dubious story about the unrelenting optimism of the African people. "Hope, it seems, is Africa's most abundant harvest," she writes cloyingly, later adding: "At the heart of this seeming contradiction is a paradox—a surfeit of misery met not with stoicism but with an unshakable faith in an unknown future."

Polgreen's essay is based on a recent survey by Gallup International that measures optimism by asking people around the world: "So far as you are concerned, do you think that 2006 will be better, or worse than 2005?" The study shows that the Africans surveyed were more likely than others to think that 2006 would be better (57% to 48%), and Polgreen uses this stat to make her grand statements about the African condition.

The one person who brings some sanity to the article is Meril James, the Secretary General of Gallup International, who suggests that African "optimism" may be nothing more than the sentiments of people who can't imagine the situation actually getting worse. "There is a sense that when things can't get worse you've reached rock bottom, so things must improve," she says. But thinking that things can't get worse is far different from optimism, so we asked James if she thought the numbers would hold if the question was phrase "Are you upbeat about your current situation?"

"Of course, changing question wording would affect the results, as you comment, but we have asked this particular question for more than 25 years now and so the trends are quite consistent," she writes. "Why should some of the poorest countries be the most optimistic is probably more of a philosophical question than a research one!"

Even if those statistics had some meaning in terms of optimism, though, generalizing an "African condition" from the results would be dubious. That's because Africa wasn't surveyed. In fact, only eight African countries were, and in many of those countries, the only people that the researchers talked to were in the main urban centers. And while some of the African countries surveyed did indeed have higher rates of people predicting that 2006 would be better than 2005, others absolutely did not. In Kenya, for example, only 28% of those surveyed thought that 2006 would be better, compared to 48% worldwide. In Cameroon, only 31% thought it would be better, while 38% thought it would be worse. (The international average of those who thought 2006 would be worse is 20%.)

James tells Gelf that her organization made it a point not to overstate its findings about the African countries it surveyed. "In many of them, we have not covered the entire population but we always state the sample we have covered," she writes over email. "Similarly, we make no claim that these eight countries represent anything more than a selection of African countries—and may not be representative of the whole continent."

But Gallup International's press releases do not seem to share the restraint of their Secretary General. "Looking at regions across the world, Africa is the most optimistic region…
" reads the one for their most recent survey (PDF). Sounds like it could be the opening of a great book.