Europeans and North Americans imagine Africans to be rural, unsophisticated people who have, until relatively recently, lived in a pristine, unchanging state of nature. Such images are the stock in trade of a century of Hollywood movies. They continue to permeate Western media, from credit-card commercials to tourist advertisements. Nineteenth-century imperialists relied on these stereotypes to justify their conquest of the continent. More recently, many in the West have turned the stereotypes on their head, idealizing Africans as more spiritual, and less materialistic and wasteful, than themselves. There are grains of truth to this oversimplification. Throughout their history, Africans have been less likely to live in cities than their contemporaries in Europe or Asia. There are profound continuities in African history that have at times acted as a brake on dramatic change, and over the past millennium, African economies have not matched regions such as Europe and Asia in their output of manufactured goods. But this monolithic view of Africans, whether held by neo-imperialists or critics of globalization, is very much a stereotype, the oversimplification of which hides the remarkable diversity that characterizes the peoples of the continent.