A couple of interesting things have happened on the eastern side of Africa since July — if you consider the eastern side to begin from Alexandria in Egypt, go down via Maputo in Mozambique through to Port Elizabeth in South Africa.

In July two Eritreans, Daniel Teklehaimanot and Merhawi Kudus, made history when they became the first black Africans to race in the Tour de France, the world’s most famous bicycle race.

At the start of August, Egypt inaugurated a new, expanded Suez canal, the first such expansion since it opened in 1869. The $7.9 billion New Suez Canal project even came in ahead of the one-year schedule demanded by strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, instead of three as initially planned. You can’t get more “unAfrican” than that.

Then, a few days ago, Ethiopian Airlines announced a net profit of $175 million for the financial year ended June 2015.

That was when ailing rivals South African Airways and Kenya Airways recorded huge losses, and it was more than the profits of all the rest of Africa’s aviation industry combined.

And from the just-ended Beijing World Athletics Championship, Kenya’s Julius Yego rewrote the record books. Not only did he win for his country its first major field gold medal, but he did so in style.

His 92.72 metre throw was the third best in javelin history after the world record by the Czech Jan Zelezny in 1996 and his own record of 92.80 from the Edmonton Championships in 2001.

That was after Nicholas Bett gave Kenya its first-ever gold medal in 400 metres hurdles world title. Yego, as everyone knows, taught himself how to throw the javelin by watching YouTube videos. And Kenyans — and East Africans — don’t do hurdles, let alone the plain regular 400m.

The last time an East African took a hurdles title, it was Uganda’s John Akii-Bua. And he bagged the country’s first gold medal in the 400m hurdles in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Now South Africa is very interesting. Watching the diversity of their field, and especially the young athletes in the World Youth Championship in early July in Colombia, they are on course to be a major force in the world over the next decade if they don’t drop the baton.

Why would any of this matter? Partly because early in the year intelligence and forecasting firm Stratfor took note of a trend some are already watching.

Observing that China was already wobbling a bit, Stratfor identified 16 countries — which it calls the Post-China 16 — that are best positioned to take over as global manufacturing hubs in future. Among these are Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Other analysts see the future kingdom of the global economy in the Indian Ocean Rim, driven by China, which will still have momentum, but even more so, a bounding India.

Until lately, it was thought they would lift up the eastern side of Africa too. But now it seems another wave, one generated by a growing social and economic dynamic on the east side of the continent, will converge with the Asian wave.

The second thing we didn’t know was how sophisticated the East African wave would be. We now have some sort of answer.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3