This is a beautifully produced book with many color plates that illustrate and enhance the arguments made by the fourteen authors (two introductory chapters and twelve case studies). At U.S.$60 it is a relative bargain for university libraries in North America and Europe, but I wonder how much it will appear in African university libraries or on the bookshelves of Africa-based scholars and professionals in fields such as architecture, urban planning, conservation, and museum/heritage management.

In his introductory chapter, the editor, John Beardsley, expresses his vision of the book as “a polyphonic chorus, rather like Africa itself, of voices both black and white from within and outside the continent, offering a range of perspectives on its historical landscapes” (2). The case studies extend from Mali south to Madagascar and South Africa, with a cluster of four southern African examples and two from Nigeria. West Africa is further represented by Neil Norman’s chapter on the Gbe kingdoms of modern-day Benin and Togo, and there are three East African cases, ranging from Swahili pillar tombs (mostly in Kenya) to sacred groves of Pare cultivators (Tanzania), and the (mostly Kenyan) landscapes of pastoral nomads such as the Maasai and Turkana.

The goal of presenting a polyphonic chorus is perhaps achieved less in the contributors to the book, which is based on the papers presented at the symposium “Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa” held at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C., in May 2013. Black voices are there; African voices are there; but only three of the thirteen contributors (excluding the editor from this count) are currently based at African universities, and all of these are in South Africa. My fear is that the point made by Grey Gundaker about the exclusion of African examples from survey texts on garden and landscape studies is only confirmed by the absence in this book of contributors from most African universities. Gundaker explains the situation as based on “premises of racial superiority, individualism, technical and aesthetic progress, and biological and cultural evolutionism” (17); my explanation would be a more materialistic one. Most scholars based in African universities face heavy teaching loads, lack of research funds, and limited access to journals and books. Even in this electronically connected world, they have limited Internet access unless they pay for it themselves; we should also recognize the difficulty of getting visas for travel to North America and Europe. I see a divide primarily based not on race, but on levels of institutional support for scholarship.

This is to be regretted, since many of the chapters provide excellent historical outlines, backed up by a wide range of sources, with either explicit or implied suggestions for further research that would be of great benefit to Africa-based scholars. One of the themes that appears throughout the book is the idea of landscape as a “process” rather than a “thing” (Michael Sheridan, 238) and thus its dynamic and contested nature. The role of power and capital in influencing how landscape is perceived and managed is also brought out frequently: for example, in Charlotte Joy’s reference to the “heritage elite” suspected of “disproportionally drawing economic benefit from the heritage funding pouring into Djenné” (82) and in Maano Ramutsindela’s pithy comments on the selective attention paid to culture in the establishment of the Greater Mapungubwe Trans Frontier Conservation Area, where “culture is reinvented and appropriated to fit into the logics of conservation that, in turn, produce entirely new landscapes that appeal to environmentalists, politicians, tourists, and the like” (390). Other chapters show the role of local elites in creating and controlling particular landscapes, such as the Gbe palace gardens and forests described by Neil L. Norman and rare hardwoods described by Randall Bird that are only for use in houses of the royal and elite Merina—a reminder that precolonial African societies had their own hierarchies that have left their marks on the landscape.

One area in which there is much potential for future research is that of the “everyday lived reality of residents” (80) and “the multiple material and relational understandings that stem from inhabiting rather than objectifying the environment” (398). Akin Ogundiran’s chapter on the Osun sacred grove in Osogbo provides a fascinating insight into “everyday lived reality” through his study of the litter left behind by visitors to the ritual baths (306–7); Ikem Okoye’s discussion of the “fearful wilderness” or “bad bush” ajöfia groves of Igbo-speaking communities begins with the powerful story of events leading up to and following the destruction of the Okija grove in 2004. Other chapters (for example Sandy Prita Meier on Swahili pillar tombs and Paul Lane on pastoralist landscapes) focus more on the past and the archaeological record, but here also readers can find many ideas for research on the lived reality of coastal communities and pastoral nomads, respectively.

The sometimes contested relationship between “tradition” and “modernity” in the postcolonial African state is brought out in several chapters, and is a fertile field for further enquiry. Innocent Pikirayi describes Great Zimbabwe as “a contested landscape that places local communities into direct confrontation with the postcolonial state” (105), and such confrontations face the spirit mediums whose stories are told in Joost Fontein’s chapter on the politics of rain over several decades of Zimbabwe’s recent history. Returning to the Osun story: in the 1960s to about 2005, “visions of tradition, indigenous modernism, and ecological preservation collided with visions of antitradition, antipreservation, and materialistic postcolonial modernization” for the future of the grove (311–12). The Osun grove survived, and today it continues to represent many things to different people, as a “dynamic bridge between the past that lives in the present and the present that is still unfolding” (314).

Each landscape has its own dynamics and balance (or imbalance) of power, and it is unreasonable to expect that the Osun story, demonstrating how modernization and indigenous African practices can be complementary, can be replicated in every landscape where comparable contestations are taking place. But Ogundiran’s account does show how recognizing the concept of “multiplexity,” not only as a theoretical construct, but also in terms of management policy and practice, can allow a landscape to survive and continue to serve the interests of local, national, and international stakeholders. There is much to be learned from this book, which should be widely read by African scholars and those responsible for the management of cultural heritage.