This edited collection is the outcome of a research project jointly sponsored by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany. The topic at hand is memory and its various uses – personal, cultural, and political – in the present and, as the book argues, in imagining the future. An abiding spirit is Reinhart Koselleck, whose work on temporality and ‘futures past’ appears as a key reference point for many of the chapters. In fact, I wish there had been a stronger engagement with the complex interplay between memory and temporality in the introduction through an overview of the existing literature. Such a review of Koselleck and others would have better served the diversity of contributions from an international cohort of scholars that follow. As it stands, the ten-page introduction dwells primarily on capsule summaries of each chapter, with only a brief discussion of the modes and uses of memory in Africa and elsewhere.

The book consists of thirteen chapters organized into three unbalanced parts, roughly, though not entirely, geographic in orientation. Part One, the largest section, groups together a set of eight essays on memory practices in Africa ranging in place from Mali, to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to South Africa. They also vary in purpose from offering theoretical statements, to focused case studies, to country summaries on the topic of memory. Albert Grundlingh and Patrick Harries provide the two strongest chapters, addressing the commemoration of the South African War (Chapter Six) and the politics of memory after apartheid (Chapter Seven), respectively. The remaining chapters offer insights on the local uses of memory, but often in speculative, rather than conclusive, ways. Bogumil Jewsiewicki (Chapter Three), for example, examines its role in nation-building through the cases of the DRC and South Africa. While his argument for the importance of the past in constructing narratives of the present and future is persuasive, his comparative treatment of these two contexts appears too slight, given the magnitude of their radically different histories. Mamadou Diawara (Chapter Five) similarly argues for the importance of local knowledge, including memory, for interrogating ideas of ‘development’ in Mali, but his contribution is more critical of the existing literature than illustrative of the kind of knowledge he has in mind. Annekie Joubert (Chapter Two) offers a detailed interpretation of such knowledge, specifically forms of praise poetry in South Africa, although her discussion, in swerving from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), to nineteenth-century politics, to the Maji Maji Uprising in Tanzania, to Auschwitz, loses its focus. Emphasizing individual experience, Justin Bisanswa (Chapter Four) offers a more personal meditation on the importance of transcribing memory as a means of negotiating its subjective and transient qualities, particularly in the aftermath of violence as found in the Great Lakes region. It is an observation with appeal, yet one whose claims already appear self-evident.

These individual weaknesses extend to the larger structure of the book as well. The chapters that bookend this eclectic first group include a piece by Elísio Macamo (Chapter One) on social theory in relation to Africa and a chapter by Bernard Lategan (Chapter Eight) on the ideas of Reinhart Koselleck. The latter is useful – offering insight into Koselleck's positions toward teleology, eschatology, and utopian ideals vis-à-vis history and memory – but it is unclear why it is buried in the middle of the text. This examination would be better served in the introduction. Macamo's chapter baffled me, frankly, given its generalizing claim that African intellectuals have not developed an ‘African sociology’ and that, consequently, ‘African intellectuals must make their implicit recognition of the constitutive role of the past much more explicit by engaging in a more direct way with Africans’ experience of modernity as it manifests itself in social reality’ (p. 25). Macamo is either poorly informed, badly translated, or willfully overlooking a vast literature on African intellectual production. In any case, his prescriptive conclusion comes off as too generalizing, and it is ill-placed as a first chapter introducing the volume as a whole. Unfortunately, the volume does not end well either. Part Two is only three chapters that attempt to provide an intercultural context through case studies from Germany (Chapter Nine by Jörn Rüsen), India (Chapter Ten by Ranjan Ghosh), and South Korea (Chapter Eleven by Han Sang-Jin). These chapters offer some comparative insight, but no direct connections are made to Africa. Part Three ostensibly offers two personal accounts of historical memory, but one is actually a meditation on methodology and the TRC by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the final chapter is a transcript of a speech given by Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor, on her experiences as a human test subject at Auschwitz. Although powerful to read on its own terms, it is an odd finish to a book on historical memory in Africa, given that there is no concluding summary chapter.

Submitting a negative book review is unpleasant business, but this volume is poorly organized with essays that often feel incomplete. The key advantage that edited collections have over monographs is their intrinsic polyphonic nature, allowing for a range of case studies, perspectives, and even internal debates among contributors that can arrive at new ways of thinking about established topics or outline the contours of fresh subjects for consideration. Although a number of the authors are well-established and highly-esteemed, this book could have used more editorial rigor or a longer gestation to bring out a stronger vision with a set of intentions that would inspire future scholarship. The argument that memory has future-oriented uses is not terribly novel, at least as outlined here. In sum, this book raises an issue of interest to many historians of Africa, but it does not manage to push this topic in a new direction.