JOHANNESBURG — Across sub-Saharan Africa, consumer demand is fueling the continent’s economies in new ways, driving hopes that Africa will emerge as a success story in the coming years comparable to the rise of the East Asian Tigers in the second half of the 20th century.

约翰内斯堡——在整个撒哈拉以南非洲，消费者的需求正在以新的方式推动这片大陆的经济，使人们燃起希望，想象非洲会在未来数年取得成功，堪比亚洲四小龙(East Asian Tigers)在20世纪下半页的崛起。

After seeing years of uninterrupted economic expansion across Africa, governments, analysts and investors are focusing on this fast-growing continent’s shoppers and workers rather than just the usual upswing in commodity prices that have driven past cycles of boom and bust.

见证了整个非洲多年不间断的经济扩张后，政府、分析人士和投资者正在将注意力集中在这片增长迅速的大陆上的消费者和工薪阶层，而不仅仅是通常的大宗商品价格上扬。在过去，这些价格的上涨推动了该地区的繁荣和萧条的循环。

The African Development Bank projected in its latest annual report in May that foreign investment in Africa would reach a record $80 billion this year, with a larger share of the money going to manufacturing and not just the strip-mining of resources.

5月，非洲开发银行(African Development Bank)在其最新的年度报告中预计，非洲今年的外国投资将达到800亿美元（约合5000亿元人民币），创下纪录，且投资不仅仅流向资源开采，进入制造业的资金比例也有所增加。

“The development is real, and on the back of that, there’s a lot of commercial opportunity that’s emerging,” said Simon Freemantle, senior political economist at Standard Bank here.

“发展是真实的，在发展的背后，大量商机正在出现，”南非标准银行(Standard Bank)的高级政治经济师西蒙·弗里曼特尔(Simon Freemantle)说。

At times messy and difficult to quantify, Africa’s economies give pessimists and optimists plenty of statistical ammunition to support their narratives of the future. Growth is uneven. Inequality is rising in many corners. Millions of people still live in extreme poverty. With violence simmering in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and elsewhere, it’s easy to fall back on the old pessimistic plotline for sub-Saharan Africa.

虽然非洲经济有时很混乱，且难以量化，却给悲观主义者和乐观主义者都提供了大量统计方面的弹药，支撑各自对将来的看法。该地区的增长并不平衡。在许多国家，不平等状况正在加剧。数以百万记的人口依然生活在极端贫困中。在中非共和国、南苏丹和其他地方暴力一触即发的情况下，人们很容易像以前一样，对撒哈拉以南非洲持悲观态度。

The middle class has expanded rapidly across the continent, but the population has grown so quickly that the absolute number of impoverished Africans has gone up at the same time. Sushi restaurants in Dakar, Senegal, and fancy coffee shops in Kigali, Rwanda, do not improve the lives of subsistence farmers in the hinterland.

整个大陆的中产阶级扩张迅速，但人口增速太快，以至于非洲贫困人口的绝对人数也同时在增加。塞内加尔达喀尔的寿司店及卢旺达基加利的精品咖啡馆并没有改善偏僻地区自给自足的农民的生活。

Yet a sign of confidence is the success with which African countries have been able to tap international capital markets of late. In spite of recent terrorist attacks, Kenya sold $2 billion worth of bonds to international investors last month, which will be used in part to pay for infrastructure projects; two months earlier, it was Zambia with a $1 billion offer.

然而，一个令人充满信心的迹象是，非洲国家最近成功地利用了国际资本市场。尽管不久前发生了恐怖袭击，但肯尼亚上月向国际投资者出售了价值20亿美元的债券。这笔资金中的一部分将被用来为基础设施项目买单。两个月前，赞比亚发行了价值10亿美元的债券。

Exports from sub-Saharan Africa leapt from $68 billion to more than $400 billion from 1995 to 2012. A total of $300 billion of that came from natural resources, the extraction of oil, natural gas, precious metals and diamonds. Angola pumps 1.8 million barrels of oil a day which is why its capital, Luanda, hosts fancy designer boutiques.

撒哈拉以南非洲的出口额从1995年的680亿美元，增至2012年的逾4000亿美元。其中，石油、天然气、贵重金属和钻石等自然资源的总出口额达3000亿美元。安哥拉的日产油量达180万桶，这正是该国首都罗安达拥有众多炫目的精品时装店的原因。

But some of the most rapid growth is now coming from other sectors. In South Africa, for example, the broader economy has been sluggish, but the black middle class now spends more money than the white middle class.

但最迅速的增长部分来自其他行业。比如，虽然南非整体经济不景气，但如今，黑人中产阶级的支出高于白人中产阶级。

For decades, this country’s long-neglected black consumers spent their money on the far edges of the economy, buying necessities like soap, salt and milk at informal convenience stores called spaza shops. During the hard years of apartheid, Itumeleng Mothibeli’s grandparents ran one such shop in a township, the peri-urban communities to which blacks had been exiled under the racist system.

在长达几十年的时间里，该国的黑人消费者长期被忽视，他们的消费均发生在经济领域的边缘地带，在被称作私人商店的非正式便利店购买肥皂、盐和牛奶等生活必需品。在实行种族隔离的艰难岁月里，伊图梅伦·莫蒂贝利(Itumeleng Mothibeli)的祖母便在一个小镇上经营着这样一家商店。那里位于城市边缘，根据种族制度，黑人都被驱逐到了那里的社区。

Now Mr. Mothibeli manages 14 shopping centers spread across four provinces of South Africa for the Vukile Property Fund. The company targets the long-shunned township market for its high volume, turnover and foot traffic. Instead of the one-story brick stand adjacent to his grandparents’ house, these are enormous Western-style shopping malls that are doing brisk business.

如今，莫蒂贝利为武凯尔房地产基金(Vukile Property Fund)管理着14家购物中心，遍布南非的四个省份。该公司以长期被回避的乡镇市场为目标，因为那里有较高的销量、营业额和客流量。当年，他祖母的商店只是家旁边的一层砖结构建筑，而他管理的都是大型西式购物中心，生意兴隆。

“In the old days, you had cathedrals in the middle of towns,” said Mr. Mothibeli, 30, as he drove a gold Toyota Corolla company car into the parking lot of the Daveyton mall. “Now you have shopping centers.”

“过去，城镇中心矗立着大教堂，”30岁的莫蒂贝利在将公司的一辆金色丰田卡罗拉(Toyota Corolla)开进戴维顿购物中心的停车场时说，“现在则是购物中心。”

Businesses alert to the opportunities are setting up shop in Africa.

敏锐把握机会的企业正在非洲开店营业。

In April, Marriott closed a deal to buy the 116-hotel Protea Hospitality Group, based in South Africa. Clothing companies like Forever 21 and Sweden’s H&M plan to open their first shops here as well. Wal-Mart’s South African arm, Massmart, has stores in a dozen African countries, including Uganda and Mozambique, and plans to expand into Angola next year.

4月，万豪国际(Marriott)达成了收购总部位于南非的普罗梯亚酒店集团(Protea Hospitality Group)的协议，该集团旗下拥有116家酒店。Forever 21和瑞典的H&M等服装公司也计划在这里开设首批店铺。沃尔玛(Wal-Mart)在南非的子公司Massmart在乌干达和莫桑比克等十几个非洲国家设有门店，并计划于明年进入安哥拉。

Last year, Honda opened its third motorcycle subsidiary in Africa, based in Kenya, including a new assembly plant. Heineken plans to invest nearly $700 million a year in Africa to keep up with the demand of the continent’s beer drinkers. The Chinese shoemaker Huajian is spearheading the construction of a $2 billion special economic zone in Ethiopia that will focus on light manufacturing.

去年，本田(Honda)在肯尼亚开设了该公司在非洲的第三家摩托车子公司，包括一座新装配厂。为了跟上非洲大陆啤酒消费者的需求，喜力(Heineken)计划每年在非洲投资近7亿美元。中国制鞋企业华坚正牵头在埃塞俄比亚建设一个投资20亿美元的特别经济区，该经济区将主要服务于轻工制造业。

Perhaps no country illustrates the pitfalls and opportunities quite as starkly as Nigeria. Even as the country is projected to grow at a swift 7.3 percent clip this year and next, the kidnapping and murdering by Boko Haram militants, who operate with impunity in Nigeria’s northeast, transfix the world.

或许没有哪个国家能像尼日利亚那样明显地说明这其中的隐患和机遇。尽管该国今明两年预计会以7.3%的速度迅速增长，但有恃无恐地活动在尼日利亚东北部的博科圣地(Boko Haram)的武装分子实施的绑架和谋杀，令世界震惊。

Adewale Opawale, executive director at Strategic Research and Management Insight, a market and social research company in Lagos, said he had witnessed drastic change not just in the number of cars on the streets and airplanes taking off from the international airport there, but in the way that people do business.

拉各斯的一家市场和社会研究公司，战略研究与管理洞见(Strategic Research and Management Insight)的执行董事阿德瓦莱·奥帕瓦莱(Adewale Opawale)表示，他不仅亲眼见证了街头的汽车数量，以及从拉各斯国际机场起飞的飞机架次的显著变化，也见证了人们做生意的方式的巨变。

Consumers are moving from running around with cash for purchases to using their Internet-enabled cellphones (many with more than one phone) to place orders from online retail chains that have started to cash in on the country’s rising middle class.

消费者正在从怀揣现金东奔西跑地购物，转变为用接入了互联网的手机（很多人有多部手机）从在线零售连锁企业那里下单。这些企业已经开始从该国日渐增多的中产阶级身上盈利了。

“It’s loads of opportunity in the Nigerian consumer market,” he said. “Nigeria is on track to become one of the 20 largest economies in the world.”

“尼日利亚的消费市场有大量机会，”他说。“尼日利亚正在成为全世界最大的20个经济体之一。”

The commercial gains are not spread equally across society or across the continent. A study of the top African brands found that of the top 25, all but one — Kenya’s Safaricom — came from Nigeria or South Africa. Seven of the top 10 brands were South African. How the spoils of that growth are shared is as important to the economic success of Africa as the headlines proclaiming a statistical boom versus a broad-based improvement in the lives of the masses.

但商业成果在社会中和这片大陆上的分布并不均匀。一项针对顶级非洲品牌的研究发现，在25个顶级品牌中，除了肯尼亚的Safaricom以外，其他均来自尼日利亚或南非。十大顶级品牌中，七个来自南非。对非洲的经济成功而言，如何分配这种增长带来的利益至关重要，同样重要的还有关于统计数据显示经济繁荣的新闻标题和民众生活得到稳固改善之间的关系。

“The question of how the poor fared in the period of rapid growth in the last decade in Africa is a subject of controversy,” said Mthuli Ncube, chief economist at the African Development Bank. “The precise relationship between poverty and growth in the long term depends crucially on a growth pattern that is accompanied by structural shifts where labor moves from a low productivity to high-productivity sectors.”

“穷人在非洲过去十年的迅速增长期中过得怎么样这个问题，是一个有争议性的话题，”非洲开发银行(African Development Bank)首席经济师姆苏利·恩库贝(Mthuli Ncube)说。“从长远来看，贫困和增长之间的确切关系关键取决于增长模式。这种模式必须要有结构调整，即劳动力会从低生产率行业转移到高生产率行业。”