The cover of the last edition of Developments read “2005: Africa takes centre stage”. This was expressed in hope as much as in conviction. But it seems to be coming true.

In the UK at least, radio phone-ins, TV documentaries and newspaper features are starting to give the continent headline treatment. It is no longer just development campaigners or policy wonks who utter the mantra “trade, aid and debt relief”. As a result of their activity these issues are now part of public discourse.

This edition of Developments arrives in the wake of the Prime Minister’s “Commission for Africa ” report demanding far-reaching change in the relationship of rich countries with Africa . In July the G8 Summit in Edinburgh may – with luck and a fair wind – bring the kind of political change which actually rebalances the global scales.

But if the challenges of development in Africa are finally being recognised, it is all the more ironic that we have forgotten the Africa which will always be part of our DNA. As Paul Vallely, principal author of the final report from the Commission points out in this issue, we all have an African heritage, a hidden genetic debt from a time when the continent was joined to the rest of the world by the Sinai peninsula . “From these first few individuals everyone in the rest of the world is descended… It was here that the first tools and axes were made, and that men and women learned to make fire.”

And our reports from the Democratic Republic of Congo in this issue illustrate that ordinary people in Africa , against all the odds, are still intent on innovation – this time it’s not tools and fire, but democracy and development. Yet in this huge country, scarred by so much recent conflict, it remained an open question (as this issue went to press) whether elections will take place this year. Meanwhile, Africans continue to demonstrate a huge groundswell of imagination in music, performance and the visual arts as seen in our coverage of Africa 05. “There is a thriving emotional integrity in the art that comes out of Africa ,” says Programme Director, Augustus Casely-Hayford, “The real human need to be creative against whatever terrible backdrop there is.”

Martin Wroe, Malcolm Doney
Editors