Comprised of an engagingly written introduction and twelve chapters, this fine book makes a case for African-centered knowledges. It sidelines Euro- and Afrocentric approaches to knowledge production and formulates a new approach, Africa-centeredness, which it presents as the use of concepts and research tools that are appropriate to various African contexts where scholars work.

This is an important call, but how the editors and the contributors arrive at this recommendation is somewhat complex. To start with, the editors have to review the production of knowledge in different African context(s). The use of Africa as an organizing territorial category has to be explained, in view of its size, diversity, and various intellectual orientations and traditions. The editors note the geopolitical and historical unity that underpin the African continent, but are very careful not to speak in terms of a single knowledge, but rather ‘forms of knowledge, needs, and questions’ (p. 1). Thus, to be clear, African-centered knowledge will be about the multiplicity of many knowledge(s). For such knowledge to be distinctively African, the editors ultimately have to question the very validity of universal knowledge that is always tied to the West. As they propose a move away from the notion of universal truths, they lead their readers in the direction of alternative paths. Consequently, the process by which knowledge is produced must be explained: there is not one knowledge, but many knowledges.

The various essays, drawing on multiple examples, create multiple ontological, historical, and political contexts to allow for the explanation of knowledge and to raise epistemological questions about how knowledge is created. African knowledge is generally filtered through the lens of colonial and post-colonial encounters, and the chapters try to see how alternative constructions can be possible.

In spite of the fact that many of the key points in the book automatically lend themselves to serious debates, certain things are hard to dispute. First, the outcome of the knowledge that scholars produce has far-reaching consequences. Epistemic orders have deep consequences on institutions and how individuals imagine their place in society. As various chapters make clear, knowledge can be guided and controlled, as in sacred texts that give monopoly of control to practitioners. The constitution of knowledge implicates ethics in the sense of how individuals structure their interactions.

Second, drawing from an array of disciplines that usually do not engage in conversation with one another (marine biology, city planning, and literature), the contributors interrogate a myriad of concepts such as those defined as indigenous, imported, or ‘modern’. An epistemology of the South emerges. It frames discourse in terms of the ideas and institutions of the North versus the South, scholars in the periphery, and those in the metropole. Whether in the category of what we now label as ‘vernacular epistemology’ or the ‘subaltern’, the volume's contributors focus on ideas around the appropriation of knowledge, inclusion and exclusion, subordination, and hegemony. Knowledge, like power, is not equal.

Third, while not generalizing about African knowledge, the book looks for sustainable threads of particular epistemologies, what the editors refer to as ‘codes of meaning-making’ that can explain data collection and data analysis. As each author struggles for meaning, they deliberately try to avoid Euro- and Afrocentric knowledge in search of Africa-centered knowledge.

Many will wonder why ‘Afrocentric knowledge’ cannot be characterized as Africa-centered. It is somewhat lumped with the reproduction of ‘old forms of oppressive power and new orthodoxies’. What, then, is Africa-centered knowledge? To the editors, ‘It is a concept that assumes that knowledge, wherever and by whomsoever it is produced, is available for transgressive, emancipatory and counter-hegemonic use, even as it will necessarily be contradictory, contested and fluid’ (p. 2). Many are likely to argue that what is called the ‘African perspective’ or even the Afrocentric paradigm already fits this description.

There can be no question that this book has generated a host of complex questions that we are all invited to answer. Perhaps there can be no definitive answers to how knowledge is produced in various centers and what the forms of African-centered knowledge will look like. The stress on knowledge as ‘political’ underscores the commitment to an activist scholarship; so also is the belief that Africa is not the archaic ‘other’ that requires the Euro-centric tools of modernity to understand itself. Scholarship, the book suggests, must link policy and practice, as research must be connected with transformation. The editors and contributors encourage us to listen to all voices so that we can create a hospitality and universe of ideas that respect and represent various peoples and their constituencies. Our analyses must incorporate even the misheard and the unspoken.

Africa-centered knowledge, as presented in this volume, still requires greater clarification in terms of definition and methodology. Several of the ideas remain speculative, but they are well presented to stimulate considerable debate. The substantive chapters provide many thought-provoking ideas and insights that challenge us to consider how we know and what we want to know. That further possibilities on methodology and epistemology are extended to various disciplines is evidence of the great value of this book.