Journal of Religion in Africa 53 (2023) 249–252

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Book Review

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Falola, Toyin, Decolonizing African Studies: Knowledge Production, Agency, and Voice,
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2022, 678pp., isbn 9781648250279,
$155.00 (hardcover).

This massive book on the question of decolonizing African studies appears

to be the first of its kind from a single author. It is only fitting that it is writ-
ten by a scholar of Professor Falola’s stature, who has spent several decades
reflecting on these issues. Comprised of an introduction, 20 chapters of about
30 pages each, a lengthy bibliography (623–664), and an index (665–678), the
book is divided into three parts that look at the question of the decolonization
of African studies from both disciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, the first part focuses on the question of
knowledge production, discussing how knowledge on and about Africa has
been produced and what decolonization entails in this context. The second
part focuses on African agency and voice, and addresses different perspectives
from which the call for decolonization has been made and how African agency
and voice can be given priority. The third part focuses on decolonizing some of
the disciplines in African studies, including literature, feminism, queer studies,
history, philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and the university itself.
The book focuses on epistemic decolonization, that is, on the centering of
African knowledges in the process of knowledge production on and about
Africa, even though it recognizes the limits of epistemic decolonization. As
Falola notes, the book can be viewed as a ‘manual’ (x) intended to help schol-
ars of African studies enter the debate of decolonizing the discipline from dif-
ferent perspectives. The fact that it is a manual makes it possible for one to
begin reading it from any of its chapters, given that understanding one chapter
does not depend on understanding the chapters that came before or after it.
That each chapter seems to be independent of the other sometimes creates the
problem of repetition for someone reading the whole book since issues that
have been addressed in previous chapters are taken up again in subsequent

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill NV | doi:10.1163/15700666-12340267

© David Ngong, 2023 | ISSN: 0022-4200 (print) 1570-0666 (online)
250 BOOK REVIEW

chapters. For example, the colonial background that warrants decolonization,

the question of language and decolonization, and the centrality of orality in
African knowledge production are addressed from different perspectives in
several chapters of the book. This repetition may be due to the fact that the
book developed from presentations made in different contexts around the
world, so that these issues needed to be rehashed for each audience.
Even though the work focuses on the African continent, Falola’s concep-
tion of African studies includes what can be described as African and African
diaspora studies since the study of Africa is often connected to the study of the
African diaspora (see 214–222, 595–608). He focuses on the conceptual decolo-
nization of African studies but also acknowledges that there are myriad ways
of considering the issue (420–422). Thus even though the book is written by a
single author one sometimes hears different voices with respect to what decol-
onization means or should look like. While the author focuses on epistemic
decolonization that seeks to center African voices and episteme, he seems to
realize that this may be more easily said than done, and it does not apply in
equal measure across the discipline.
Falola appears to be more militant about the possibility of decolonization
of African studies in some chapters than in others. For example, in discuss-
ing the decolonization of religion and philosophy (chapters 18 and 19) he
claims that ‘many Africans who have partaken of Western education have been
de-Africanized in one way or another’, and that when ‘the entrenched values
of atr are widely accepted and practiced openly, it will reengineer the peo-
ple in an entirely different way’ (538, 555). To this end, the author controver-
sially calls for the nationalizing of African indigenous religions to ‘bring social
respect and encourage people to publicly associate with it’ (554). In other
words, governments should be involved in promoting indigenous religions in
the continent. When it comes to the decolonization of African philosophy, the
author sees those who call ethnophilosophy into question as sellouts who fail
to see the uniqueness of African philosophy and how this philosophy is rooted
in orality rather than in writing. Thus philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji,
Kwasi Wiredu, and others are seen as dancing to the tunes of Eurocentric con-
ceptions of philosophy. To decolonize African philosophy, Falola avers, African
philosophers need to follow Walter Mignolo’s advice of delinking from the
West and relinking ‘with the legacies of indigenous cultures’ (581). However,
the author also acknowledges that Africa is inextricably connected to the rest
of the world, and that African philosophy cannot be extricated from the rest of
the world (581 note 45).
This intricate connection to the rest of the world is a caveat that seems to
tame the understanding of decolonization found in much of the book. This is

Journal of Religion in Africa 53 (2023) 249–252