A gathering of African intellectuals in 2016—Ateliers de la Pensée I [Workshops of Thought]—aimed to be a “renewal of French-speaking Afro-diasporic critical thinking; it also served as an impetus for generating new perspectives concerning … Africa’s future” (2). Somewhat ironically, the participants—some of whose essays appear in To Write the Africa World—seem to have widely accepted one key idea as a significant part of their thinking: double consciousness. First clearly articulated more than a century before by W.E.B. Dubois, that awareness reverberates through many of their twenty-one collected articles. Yet only one among them, Hourya Bentouhami, actually mentions “DuBois’s reflections” on the subject, describing them “as a strange and painful cognitive disjunction … in the dialogue of the soul with itself”(125). Another contributor, Benaouda Lebdai, instead credits Sudanese born British writer Jamal Maljoub with integrating “his status of being double” as part of his authorial identity (53). Other writers of essays included in the book merely assume an understanding of the concept as fundamental to their thought and, perhaps more importantly, in conveying a concept of Africa to the wider world.

This review essay explores the complex subject of peace in Africa by reviewing six volumes. While the African Union and the United Nations identify peace as providing the foundation for development, the quest for sustainable peace in regions of postcolonial Africa has remained elusive. Several works have sought to examine the contemporary pathways to peace currently being explored on the continent. The works under review must be located in this search for sustainable peace in Africa.

Irregular migrants’ flows have, for several years now, been making the news headlines and are at the core of political debates. In a context of polycrisis—characterized by the post COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and its devastating impacts; the disruption of labor markets caused by the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence; or geopolitical tensions in different parts of the globe that threaten the livelihoods of many communities—the desire to move from the developing and emerging world to the West can increase.

The apartheid experience in South Africa was a horrendous one for mankind, in which humans unleashed all sorts of evil on one another due to unfounded categorization based on color. This led to a superiority complex where a class saw another as not worth the treatment their dogs received. The fact is that black color was an adaptive one, given the environment of the possessors; the melanin which is the pigmentation that makes the skin black is meant to prevent the skin from cancer emanating from radiations from the sun. It shouldn’t be a thing of social disequilibrium. Following the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in 1990 and the demise of the apartheid system of rule, South Africa became a free country, which provided the ground for South Africans and others to embark on penning books of personal histories of these painful experiences under apartheid.

Paulin Hountondji is an essential figure in the literary and philosophical world of Africa. Rereading The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa allowed me to rediscover a man whose theoretical work is indissociable from action. Conscious of the dangers of sterile speculation and above all passionate about improving Africans’ conditions of existence, Hountondji develops a way of thinking that leads to action. My reflection foregrounds the priorities of a philosopher whose ultimate aim is human flourishing and the coming of freedom to the continent.

In Amilcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist, a translation and revision of his earlier Portuguese edition, Antonio Tomas addresses what he sees as a gap between the reality of the armed struggle in Guinea and the ways in which it has been discussed by all previous writers on the subject. He claims to base his critique on newly released archival information and recent publications on Cabral, Portuguese colonialism, and its anti-colonial movements in Africa.

In this brief memoriam, I argue that Hountondji’s methodological concern over the possibility of African philosophy led him to query the very idea of philosophy as the search for universal knowledge. Hountondji’s lasting legacy thus consists, among other things, in challenging the image of Western philosophy as the repository of universal knowledge. To the contrary, philosophy will come into its own only through the critical construction of culturally and politically unrestricted discourse from different philosophical traditions.