Editor's introduction Flavio Albanese. Happy awareness If we were to think of Africa as a single nation with a population of nearly one billion, as the World Bank recently did, we’d discover that its GNP would be higher than Brazil’s or India’s.

India in fact, which the media keep telling us is the new economic horizon along with China, on equal terms of population compared to our fictitious pan- African vision, would actually have a per capita annual income 250 dollars lower. In 2007 alone, over 20,000 enterprises in 19 different African countries were engaged in favoured trade dealings with China and India, in a steadily rising trend. So why does everybody go on talking about the Indian and Chinese economies, and never about the African ones?