Africans can expect to live the shortest lives, earn the lowest incomes and suffer some of the worst misrule on the planet

Lydia Polgreen:

They are more likely than anyone on earth to bury their children before the age of 5, to become infected with H.I.V., to die from malaria and tuberculosis, to require food aid.

Yet a recent survey by Gallup International Association of 50,000 people across the world found that Africans are the most optimistic people. Asked whether 2006 would be better than 2005, 57 percent said yes. Asked if they would be more prosperous this year than last, 55 percent said yes.

These data bear out what I see all the time as I travel across sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent: that every single day lived here, each birth, wedding, graduation, sunrise and sunset is, in ways large and small, a daily triumph of hope over experience.

Hope, it seems, is Africa's most abundant harvest.

"If I put on my academic hat, I would have nothing to tell you to explain this," said Kayode Fayemi, a political scientist in Nigeria and a leading pro-democracy activist there, a man who has every reason to be pessimistic as chaos threatens to engulf his country. "The only thing keeping people going is hope and optimism about the future that is unknown. The hope is the evidence of things not seen. I think that is the only way to explain optimism, because you can't base it on any analysis of our current condition."

Experts at Gallup International have grappled with the meaning of the data, which seem counterintuitive, but turn out to be consistent over time and in many places that have suffered through catastrophe. Places like Kosovo and Bosnia, for example, which have emerged from bloody wars to face an uncertain future, score high on the optimism scale.

Africa has topped that scale for years, a ranking indifferent to the continent's repeated cycles of hope and despair.

Meril James, secretary general of Gallup International, said that Africa's optimism might reflect a reality so grim that nothing could really be worse.

"There is a sense that when things can't get worse you've reached rock bottom, so things must improve," Ms. James said.

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