African universities across the continent are positioned at the intersection of competing demands: global competitiveness versus local relevance; market-driven reforms versus the call to fulfil their third mission; and inherited Eurocentric epistemologies versus calls for decolonized knowledge systems. Three recent books collectively interrogate these tensions, thereby contributing to a growing body of scholarship that critically examines contemporary African universities as contested institutions shaped by neoliberal economics, political pressures and epistemic hierarchies. As scholars such as Valentin-Yves Mudimbe have long argued, African knowledge production remains entangled in inherited colonial orders of thought that continue to define what counts as legitimate.Footnote ¹

Taken together, Decolonising African University Knowledges. Volume 2: Challenging the neoliberal mantra, edited by Amasa P. Ndofirepi, Felix Maringe, Simon Vurayai and Gloria Erima, University and Academics’ Societal Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa: benefits, drivers, and constraints of knowledge production, by Nelson Casimiro Zavale and Christian Schneijderberg, and Academic Freedom in Africa: the struggle rages on, edited by Yamikani Ndasauka and Garton Kamchedzera, converge in diagnosing the structural constraints that undermine African universities. They diverge, though, in how centrally they position African epistemologies; how they conceptualize academic freedom; how they view the role of the African university; and how far they move from critique towards practical institutional alternatives.

Ndofirepi et al.’s second volume of Decolonising African University Knowledges sets the conceptual tone for this review by interrogating how neoliberal ideology has reshaped African universities as market-oriented institutions that prioritize global rankings, revenue generation and Eurocentric notions of excellence. The contributors to this collection of essays and studies conclude that neoliberalism functions not merely as an economic policy framework but also – or primarily – as an epistemic regime that marginalizes African knowledges while privileging Western epistemologies and pedagogies.

Central to the volume is the assertion that African universities cannot be considered genuinely African simply by virtue of their location, student demographics or staff composition. Instead, ‘Africanness’ must be rooted in epistemology. The volume’s insistence that African epistemologies should be the defining core of African universities challenges dominant global higher education discourses that equate quality with conformity to Western institutional models and world rankings. While this position is assertive, I believe it also raises unresolved questions. Central among them is: how can African epistemologies be institutionally operationalized within African universities that mostly remain entangled in global knowledge economies? What is the definition of African epistemology given the heterogeneous diversity across African countries?

The early chapters problematize the pursuit of so-called ‘world-class’ status, arguing that such aspirations compel African universities to mimic Western curricula, research agendas and evaluation metrics at the expense of local relevance. Subsequent chapters deepen this critique by examining how neoliberal austerity, the commodification of knowledge, authoritarian governance practices and international economic sanctions undermine the university’s social mission.

The adoption of the continent’s indigenous practices is especially emphasized in Quegas Mutale, Tomy Ncube and Mike Mutale’s empirical study of the teaching and learning of disaster management in Zimbabwean universities; it shifts the conversation to the adoption of African indigenous knowledge. The authors advocate the use of indigenous knowledge at all levels of education as well as the pursuit of further studies into indigenous African knowledge. According to them, this will decolonize African university knowledge.

One of the volume’s notable strengths is its ability to connect macro-level political economy to micro-level academic practices. Pressures to publish in indexed international journals, dependence on external research funding, and the privileging of specific disciplines over others are shown to be deeply political processes rather than neutral indicators of academic excellence. Regrettably, the volume is more persuasive in diagnosing problems than in offering detailed pathways for institutional transformation, particularly given the financial precarity of many African universities.

Zavale and Schneijderberg’s University and Academics’ Societal Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa shifts the discussion from critique to empirical analysis by examining how universities and academics engage with society under conditions of structural constraint. The book is framed around the university’s ‘third mission’ – namely, using and sharing knowledge through technology transfer, entrepreneurship and public engagement in diverse ways. It interrogates the applicability of dominant theoretical paradigms – such as the knowledge-based economy, National Systems of Innovation, the Triple Helix model, the New Production of Knowledge or Mode 2 – to sub-Saharan African (SSA) contexts. The authors argue that the African Union’s aim to achieve a knowledge-based economy by 2063 is unrealistic. The authors elucidate this through problematizing the shortcomings of the aforementioned frameworks. Together with global critics of these frameworks, the authors make a case for SSA by clearly showing the various ways in which it realistically produces knowledge. They also intentionally exclude South Africa as they assert that it is the only country in SSA whose data contributes to the development of the problematic models mentioned.

The authors further argue that most of these conventional frameworks for analysing university–society relations are derived from European and North American experiences and therefore fail to capture the idiosyncrasies of African higher education. In many sub-Saharan African countries, weak state capacity, limited industrial bases and under-resourced research infrastructures complicate assumptions about innovation-driven economic growth. As a result, the application of models such as the Triple Helix often obscures rather than illuminates how knowledge is actually produced and circulated in these societies.

Importantly, Zavale and Schneijderberg show that higher education institutions are the primary producers of knowledge in SSA, representing 70 and 30 per cent shared between public research institutions, the private sector and NGOs. They resist a deficit narrative by highlighting diverse forms of societal engagement that extend beyond commercialization and patenting. Their analysis reveals that African universities primarily transfer knowledge through people-based and tacit mechanisms. These include teaching, community engagement, consultancies, internships and informal collaborations, which contrast with codified outputs such as patents or intellectual property. The constraint in knowledge production described by the authors and also highlighted by Ndofirepi et al. is the mass and poor production of students, particularly undergraduate students, for the job market. Their study reveals half-baked graduates in the job market who need further training. This issue also calls for SSA to examine how teachers are trained in higher education institutions, an issue that requires urgent attention.

The book also exposes the structural contradictions facing African academics. On the one hand, academics are expected to contribute to national development and social transformation; on the other, low salaries and weak institutional support incentivize practices driven by financial survival rather than intrinsic scholarly or social justice motivations. Heavy reliance on foreign and industry donor funding further shapes research agendas, often privileging externally defined priorities over local societal needs. In this respect, the book reinforces the critique of neoliberal and donor-driven knowledge regimes advanced in Decolonising African University Knowledges.

The authors also acknowledge that the competing demands facing African universities are also evident elsewhere. Seeking solutions, they point to experiences from countries such as South Korea, China and India, which show that sustained public investment, strategic global engagement and nationally defined research priorities can enhance epistemic autonomy. The authors propose an alternative analytical framework centred on ‘knowledge ecologies’ that recognize plural, multi-scalar and interactive knowledge systems; the framework remains more suggestive than prescriptive.

Ndasauka and Kamchedzera’s Academic Freedom in Africa: the struggle rages on foregrounds academic freedom as both a condition and a consequence of decolonized and socially responsive universities. The seventeen contributions to this volume situate academic freedom within broader struggles over democracy, state power and neoliberal governance, arguing that academic freedom is never simply granted but must be continually created, contested and defended.

Their volume is organized into three thematic sections: state power and democracy; education reforms and academic freedom; and reflections from Malawi’s 2011 academic freedom movement. The contributors demonstrate how state interference, donor dependency and institutional managerialism constrain critical inquiry and promote self-censorship among academics. The emphasis on self-censorship is significant, as it highlights how repression operates through both overt coercion and internalized fear and institutional norms.

Several chapters engage directly with themes raised in the other two books. The commodification of universities – driven by dwindling public funding and market-oriented reforms – is shown to erode individual as well as institutional autonomy. External funding agencies and geopolitical interests further shape what counts as legitimate research, echoing concerns about epistemic dependency raised by Ndofirepi et al., as well as by Zavale and Schneijderberg.

A distinctive contribution of this volume is its engagement with alternative philosophical frameworks for understanding academic freedom in Africa. While acknowledging the historical roots of academic freedom in classical liberalism, some contributors explore African communitarian philosophies, particularly ubuntu, as potential foundations for reimagining academic freedom as a collective rather than purely an individual right. This move resonates with calls across all three books for epistemic pluralism that recognizes the significance of indigenous knowledge systems.

A comparative dimension to the challenges facing academics is highlighted in the chapter ‘Professionalism and academic freedom: evidence from Malawi and Japan’. The authors cite Hao,Footnote ² exclaiming that academic freedom is ‘under siege everywhere in the world’. Through their case study of Malawi and Japan, they demonstrate the need for universities’ autonomy to be made transparent instead of being stifled in the name of professionalism – based on quality assurance rather than quality delivery that improves learner outcomes. They argue that when professionalism as a quality requirement is implemented as a ‘demanded’ form of professionalism, it can threaten academic freedom. This seems to me a delicate matter, given that undergraduate students churned out by African universities lack the qualities for the job market discussed by Zavale and Schneijderberg. Navigating these competing demands raises questions about the need for academics to be accountable to society, especially as they demand freedom.

Its many strengths notwithstanding, the volume is not without its limitations. Its empirical focus is heavily weighted towards two Southern African Anglophone examples, Malawi and South Africa, particularly in the third section. A broader engagement with the unique manifestations of academic freedom struggles in Francophone and Lusophone African universities would have offered a more comprehensive continental perspective. Additionally, while the book documents some aspects of struggles over academic freedom, it pays less attention to internal university dynamics that also shape academic freedom, such as gendered power relations and student–faculty tensions. Like many edited collections, the coherence between chapters can sometimes feel uneven, with some contributions engaging more deeply with the central theme of academic freedom than others.

Read together, the three publications reviewed paint a complex picture of higher education in Africa. The key issues that intersect, converge and diverge in the books centre on the purpose of the African university, neoliberalism, donor funding, epistemic dependency, African epistemologies and knowledge pluralism.

Regarding their purpose, Ndofirepi et al. argue that African universities should primarily respond to the demands of African societies before turning to global expectations. The pursuit of international status is critiqued as an externally imposed aspiration that undermines local relevance and epistemic autonomy. Echoing Mamdani’sFootnote ³ enduring question – ‘Who has the authority to decide what students are taught?’ – the book frames the university as a public-good institution whose legitimacy rests on serving African social and intellectual needs. While Zavale and Schneijderberg similarly emphasize the public role of universities, they adopt a less normative tone. Instead, they document how societal engagement already occurs through teaching, consultancy and informal collaboration. Ndasauka and Kamchedzera, in turn, extend the concern with serving local needs by linking the university’s public mandate to academic freedom. In their view, freedom of inquiry is a prerequisite for universities to meaningfully contribute to democratic and social development. To substantiate this argument, they cite the cases of the 2011 University of Malawi academic freedom protests, the 2021 Dr Sishuwa Sishuwa sedition charges in Zambia, and the Glenda Gray saga during the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa. Together, these call on the state, the public and academics to address academic freedom as a human right, which correspondingly and inarguably requires fulfilment of a duty.

Central to all three publications are the scourges of neoliberalism, donor funding and epistemic dependency. Contributors to Decolonising African University Knowledges present neoliberalism as a hegemonic force that commodifies knowledge and disciplines African universities to conform to Eurocentric norms of excellence. They argue that austerity measures, corporate funding and global ranking systems prescribe what can be researched, taught and valued, reinforcing what Mudimbe describes as Africa’s insertion into externally defined orders of knowledge.Footnote ⁴ These features of neoliberal education are empirically demonstrated by Zavale and Schneijderberg, who show how donor funding and low academic salaries drive scholars towards consultancy work aligned with external agendas that shape the kinds of knowledge produced. Ndasauka and Kamchedzera, in turn, also show how similar dependencies constrain academic freedom. They argue that the global North is undermining academic freedom in Africa through the instrumentality of geopolitics; this they do through donor research institutions that dictate what to research. In this regard, Happy Mickson Kayuni succinctly states: ‘African universities lost their autonomy to the financial crises’ (p. 118). While these authors expertly deplore the problems and challenges, they do not fully address the ways in which African universities might escape this dependency, not just philosophically but also materially.

A key tension across all these books is the question: Should African epistemologies be central or plural and coexisting with other epistemologies? Ndofirepi et al. adopt a strong position that African epistemologies must occupy a central place in defining the African university. Eurocentric curricula and pedagogies are portrayed as restrictive, reproducing epistemic hierarchies that marginalize indigenous knowledge systems. In Academic Freedom in Africa, contributors Patrick Juma and Jerry Rutsate agree with Ndofirepi et al. on the need to decolonize this system. The remedy they suggest is to include African indigenous pedagogies in the mainstream education system. They argue that it is possible for pedagogy to consider students’ cultural identities and experiences. One example they cite is the ubuntu-centric pedagogy exemplified by the National Youth Service of Malawi, which facilitates the coexistence of two pedagogies that complement one another. Another example they offer is the existence of confessional and non-confessional religious pedagogical approaches in Malawi and other African countries, as well as Tanzania’s ujamaa pedagogical approach. They stress that the main point is to prevent other pedagogies from dominating indigenous pedagogies, especially when coexistence is possible without one overpowering the other.

In contrast, a pluralist approach is adopted by Zavale and Schneijderberg, who advocate for the coexistence of Western and African knowledges within dynamic knowledge ecologies, rather than epistemic replacement. The authors adopt a pluralist framework woven from global theories of knowledge production in support of Mudimbe’s ‘African epistemology and gnosis’.Footnote ⁵

Through their different analytical lenses, the three books collectively demonstrate that decolonization, societal engagement and academic freedom are inseparable struggles within African higher education. They agree that neoliberalism and donor dependency constrain African universities, but diverge in how centrally African epistemologies should be positioned and how transformation might realistically occur.

By comparing these works, it is evident that Africa’s higher education crisis is pervasive, and the proposed pathways forward remain uneven. The books succeed in unsettling dominant assumptions about knowledge, freedom and relevance. Yet, they leave open a pressing question for the audience: economists, higher education academics and leaders, policymakers, NGOs and industry executives, African scholars and scholars in other parts of the world where similar issues are discussed. What material, political and institutional conditions are required for African universities to become sites of epistemic justice rather than ongoing epistemic compromise? The question that ultimately remains is to what extent African states and institutions will marshal the material and policy commitments necessary to translate decolonization, academic freedom and societal engagement from discursive ideals into lived university realities.