What’s to become of Africa’s teeming youth?

Demographers are attached to their theories. The field’s most enduring is the ‘demographic transition’, whereby modernisation inexorably lowers a society’s once-high fertility to replacement rate. Unfortunately, reality is obstreperous and doesn’t always obey the rules.

The United Nations Population Division bases population projections on the assumption that all countries will eventually follow the pattern of plummeting birth rates first observed across the West. Edward Paice’s Youthquake addresses the exception so far: Africa. The continent is hardly a minor asterisk. Although for many regions demographic forecasts for this century have been ratcheting downwards, in the past 20 years the UNPD has had to revise its median-variant forecast for Africa by 2050 upwards by nearly 40 per cent.

Paice’s text is heavy on statistics, but his goulash of arithmetic is easy to digest, as well as spiced with plenty of numerical eye-poppers. (Given China’s horrific leadership and unnerving geopolitical ambitions, I was cheered by the fact that its population is on track to subside from a peak of 1.5