It is a commonplace that the problems of African rural development are becoming increasingly complex - that is, they have grown more numerous, interrelated, and varied. This complexity has generated a multitude of development scenarios.

Among these is the doomsday scenario, applied to every nation on the continent, best captured in the phrase "Everything works ... except in Africa." Emery Roe argues that crisis scenarios generated by an expert (usually non-African) elite are self-serving and counterproductive. Except-Africa takes up the challenge of devising development scenarios that do justice to the continent's variegated reality.