Over the weekend I read through the publications of an academic who is up for promotion at the University of Ghana. Although as a reviewer I had to pay attention to the usual details that matter to academics (methods, theory, etc), reading his incredibly detailed research on public participation and political processes during the democratic period since democratisation in 1993 was really quite inspiring. It reminded me once again how little the world (and especially South Africans) know about how drastically things have changed in Africa over the past two decades. If they know anything, it is the so-called ‘Africa Rising’ discourse – high growth rates in some countries, massive Chinese investments, new infrastructures being built, oil being found – plus also, if they have traveled, the really crazy wild cities as millions survive in the informal settlements and traverse urban environments that lack basic infrastructures. But what is not known is how a new generation of African leaders have been systematically assembling the political and institutional infrastructures of relatively stable political systems, some of which are actually quite democratic in a messy inconclusive way. For many who see all this from a ‘Western’ liberal democratic perspective, it all looks a bit strange and smacks of old-style African patronage politics. (And, of course, they conveniently ignore the profound contradictions of their own so-called ‘Western’ liberal  democracies.) But what they are not seeing is how spaces now exist for participation in policy processes, local planning and active citizenship within the broader media environment (traditional mass media, but also electronic self-managed mass communications) that may well be irreversible. Out of the increasingly educated e-savvy urban youth cultures is emerging a complex set of exertions and energies that will inexorably widen these spaces, creating opportunities for new political formations and leaders to emerge. As always happens in Africa, what’s emerging is always difficult to see because we wear the wrong lenses to see them. But while we are not seeing, other things are happening that will eventually surprise us all. Watch this space.