This volume in the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps series is the first of two devoted to Africana thought. The book grows out of the long-running podcast of the same name. As a dedicated listener of the podcast’s 142 episodes on Africana thought, I found it satisfying to see familiar material expanded and systematised, and to have access to the full scholarly apparatus towards which the audio format can only gesture. Like the episodes, the chapters are clearly written and splendidly well researched; their bibliographical references are up to date and make it easy for readers to pursue particular figures or traditions in more depth. This alone would suffice for me to recommend the book to students and scholars interested in its themes.

The first half of the book proceeds roughly chronologically. After an opening chapter that introduces ‘Africana’ philosophy as a geographically and historically expansive field spanning Africa and the diaspora, Adamson and Jeffers turn to prehistoric Africa and ancient Mesopotamia before devoting four chapters to Egyptian wisdom literature, narratives, and dialogues. They then move to early Ethiopian philosophy and sub-Saharan Islamic intellectual traditions. Throughout, the emphasis is on showing that Africana thinkers have long engaged in recognisably philosophical reflection on metaphysics, ethics, and politics, and that these reflections belong squarely in, and not at the margins of, standard histories of philosophy.

Within this larger narrative, I found that four chapters may be of special interest to philosophers of religion (at least to this philosopher of religion): those on oral philosophy in Africa, on conceptions of God in African philosophy, on the professional reaction against ethnophilosophy, and on sage philosophy. Together, they offer both introductory material on what is often grouped under the label of African Traditional Religion (ATR) and a compact guide to the methodological debates about how such traditions can and should be treated philosophically.

Chapter 12, ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’, introduces oral philosophy in Africa by way of a brief reflection on Plato’s ambivalence about writing. If philosophy has historically been done in conversation, the authors ask, why should African oral traditions not be considered potential bearers of philosophical insight? They then turn to the emergence of ‘ethnophilosophy’, understood broadly as the attempt to recover implicit philosophical systems from proverbs, myths, rituals, and everyday speech. Placide Tempels’s and Alexis Kagame’s work on Bantu categories is treated as paradigmatic: both infer a metaphysics (for example, of vital force) from linguistic patterns and social practices. Adamson and Jeffers are careful to flag the complex colonial and missionary contexts in which these projects were undertaken, and they anticipate later criticisms of ethnophilosophy for homogenising diverse groups into a single ‘Bantu’ or ‘African’ worldview. Much of what philosophers know about the beliefs and practices now subsumed under ‘ATR’ comes through such ethnographic and missionary sources. For philosophers of religion, the chapter is a salutary reminder that any attempt to articulate an Africana philosophy of religion cannot bypass ethnography: it must instead ask how to move, responsibly and self-consciously, from recorded speech and ritual practice to articulated positions.

Chapter 14, ‘One to Rule Them All’, turns to conceptions of God in African traditions. The authors begin by questioning the familiar assumption that monotheism represents a more advanced or sophisticated religious form, and they draw attention to the long history of monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic ideas in Africa that predate Christian and Islamic missions. They then examine influential attempts by African theologians and philosophers such as E. Bolaji Idowu and John Mbiti to characterise African religions as a ‘diffused monotheism’ in which a supreme God stands above a host of lesser divinities and ancestors. But they also give space to the now canonical critiques of such projects by Okot p’Bitek and others, who argue that they ‘dress up’ African deities in Hellenistic robes to make them look more like the God of Christian theology. The chapter develops these debates through a case study of Yoruba religion, presenting a layered cosmos in which the high god Olódùmarè is acknowledged as creator and sovereign over both human beings and the divinities (òrìṣà), yet is absent from ordinary worship, which focuses on the òrìṣà and on the ancestors. Philosophers of religion will find here a reliable map of the main positions in the secondary literature. At the same time, the chapter’s framing in terms of ‘God in African philosophy’, and its focus on a singular supreme being as the organising centre, can make divine plurality and the ancestor–divinity continuum appear as complications of an underlying monotheism rather than as distinctive patterns of religious metaphysics in their own right. This is not so much a flaw of the chapter as a sign of how deeply the monotheistic template structures the categories available in much current work on ATR.

Chapter 19, ‘Professionally Speaking’, reconstructs the influential reaction against ethnophilosophy associated with Paulin Hountondji, Marcien Towa, Kwasi Wiredu, and others. On their ‘professional’ conception, philosophy should not be identified with a putative collective worldview of ‘the Bantu’ or ‘the Akan’, but with the critical, often argumentative writings of named individuals, who take responsibility for their positions and can be challenged by peers. Hountondji’s well-known definition of African philosophy as ‘the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves’ is analysed in some detail. The authors emphasise the professional school’s valorisation of scientific rationality and its insistence that African philosophy should be oriented towards the problems of contemporary African societies rather than towards the preservation of traditional lore. For philosophers of religion, this chapter is helpful in articulating worries that arise when we speak of ATR as if it were a single, unified voice with determinate doctrines about God, the person, or the afterlife. It also clarifies the danger of ventriloquism – attributing positions to ‘the African’ that in fact reflect the theorist’s own theoretical and theological choices – without settling the harder question of whether and how communal and oral religious concepts can count as philosophy at all. Here, as in other comparative work on ATR, there is an unavoidable tension between the need for usable categories and the risk of erasing the internal diversity of the traditions grouped under them.

The following chapter, ‘Wise Guys’, turns to Henry Odera Oruka’s project of ‘sage philosophy’ as a partial answer to that question. Oruka criticises ethnophilosophy for its talk of ‘philosophy without philosophers’ and the professional school for its neglect of reflective voices in largely non-literate communities. His solution is to distinguish ‘folk’ sages, who articulate and transmit communal wisdom, from ‘philosophic’ sages, who engage in critical, second-order reflection on the beliefs and practices of their community. Through interviews with such figures, Oruka sought to show that there are African philosophers even in contexts without written philosophical traditions. Adamson and Jeffers present both the promise and the problems of this approach. On the one hand, sage philosophy foregrounds individuals who have thought deeply about religion, morality, politics, and personhood, and it offers a concrete way of resisting the reduction of African thought to anonymous tradition. On the other hand, as critics have noted, the interview format raises serious methodological questions. The authors are sympathetic to Oruka’s project but ultimately relax his sharp distinction between folk and philosophic sages, suggesting that reflective endorsement of tradition can be philosophical even when it does not take an oppositional form. This is a helpful corrective to idealised images of the philosopher as a radical critic; it also invites philosophers of religion to recognise religious elders, ritual specialists, and other non-academic figures as possible interlocutors, provided that the mediation involved in recording and presenting their thoughts is handled with care.

These four chapters have several important consequences for the practice of philosophy of religion. First, they broaden the range of sources that can plausibly be treated as philosophical. The discipline’s primary materials are written, often highly scholastic texts produced by professional theologians and philosophers. Adamson and Jeffers do not deny the importance of such texts; indeed, the chapters on Ethiopian Christianity and on Islamic philosophy in West Africa exemplify how fruitful they can be. But by juxtaposing ethnophilosophy, oral traditions, professional African philosophy, and sage philosophy, the book reminds the reader that much religious reasoning, in Africa as elsewhere, is embedded in proverbs, myths, rituals, and the reflective speech of non-academic agents. The question is not whether philosophers of religion can avoid ethnography, but how they can use it responsibly, as a lens through which to reconstruct and critically engage patterns of thought that are not already laid out in treatises.

Second, the material on African conceptions of God and divine hierarchy puts pressure on some of the conceptual defaults of analytic philosophy of religion. Systems in which a high creator god coexists with a plurality of powerful divinities and a multitude of ancestors sit uneasily within the simple opposition between monotheism and polytheism. They raise questions about how to individuate ‘gods’, how to think about mediation and divine hiddenness, and how to understand worship-worthiness in a cosmos structured by layered authority and graded participation in power. While some recent work in African philosophy of religion has begun to explore these issues, it often does so under the broad and somewhat misleading heading of ATR, which emerged partly through missionary and theological efforts to find parallels with Christianity and to demonstrate the sophistication of African religions. Adamson and Jeffers present Africana materials in a way that will be intelligible to readers trained on debates about classical theism, but their survey also shows that those debates risk provincialism if they are taken as exhaustive of what philosophy of religion can be. African traditions suggest the need for a more finely grained vocabulary – one that can accommodate, for instance, hierarchical pluralisms in which one supreme being and many lesser divinities and ancestors all play significant roles in religious life.

Third, the chapters on ethnophilosophy and sage philosophy highlight questions of authority and audience that are often left implicit in philosophy of religion. Hountondji’s insistence that African philosophy must be written by Africans, for a critical community of African readers, foregrounds the importance of who one takes to be one’s primary interlocutors. Oruka’s concern to identify sages whose reflections have hitherto gone unrecorded similarly draws attention to the gatekeeping involved in deciding which voices count as philosophical. These debates have obvious analogues in philosophy of religion, where discussions still largely centre on Euro-American Christian (and to a lesser extent Muslim and Jewish) experiences and concerns. Kevin Schilbrack has described traditional philosophy of religion as narrow in its restricted diet of examples, intellectualist in its focus on beliefs to the exclusion of other religious practices, and insular in its relative isolation from the other disciplines in the academic study of religion. Adamson and Jeffers do not offer a programmatic response to these problems, but the materials they assemble make it more difficult to ignore whose experiences and conceptual worlds have been missing from standard accounts.

The second half of the book adds a wealth of further sources by turning from pre-colonial Africa to the emergence of Africana philosophy in the context of slavery and the diaspora. Here the focus shifts to written texts by enslaved and formerly enslaved people, free Black intellectuals, and their allies in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Chapters on specific figures explore the interplay between philosophical reflection, political activism, and religious discourse. Religion appears in many of these chapters less as an object of doctrinal analysis and more as a source of imagery, argument, and hope in the struggle against slavery and racial oppression: biblical exegesis, eschatological visions of liberation, and appeals to divine justice are mobilised in the service of radical critiques of Christian societies. Readers of this review cannot be given a full sense of the richness and variety of these discussions, but it is worth noting that this part of the book also has much to offer philosophers of religion, especially those interested in the intersection of religion with race, colonialism, and political resistance.

As a whole, Africana Philosophy from Ancient Egypt to the Nineteenth Century succeeds as both an introduction and an invitation. It provides a clear, engaging, and well-documented overview of a vast and heterogeneous field, and it does so in a format that lends itself well to teaching. The short chapter structure and the inclusion of notes and further-reading suggestions for each chapter will make it easy to incorporate individual topics into undergraduate and graduate courses. For philosophers of religion in particular, the book offers more than just new examples to plug into familiar debates: it brings to the fore methodological and conceptual questions that should inform any attempt to think seriously about African and Afro-diasporic religious traditions. In that sense, accessible syntheses of Africana philosophy such as this one are not optional extras but rather part of the basic intellectual literacy that the field will need if it is to move beyond its historically narrow boundaries.