Editor's Note: This article was originally posted in the Daily Beast under the title, "Why the US-Africa summit was important and why it wasn't."
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...
It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Those words penned by Charles Dickens about the period leading up to the French Revolution seem quite applicable to Africa today on the heels of the first-ever U.S.-Africa Summit. The Summit rightly focused primarily on the "spring of hope" being experienced by many in Africa's burgeoning middle and upper classes, fueled by impressive economic growth data and lucrative trade and investment opportunities in a continent which hosts six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world. But life remains truly a "winter of despair" for the millions of hungry, impoverished, displaced, and conflict-affected people who don't fit easily into the "Africa Rising" narrative being burnished around Washington this week.
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