Moving Back into the Future

“This compelling set of essays draws from multiple sources – oral traditions, cultural practices, literature and art – to explore how the past is carried into and shapes the African present. Spanning East and West Africa, it offers essential insights to scholars in several disciplines. It deserves to be widely read.” (Rhiannon Stephens, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University).

“This important collection demonstrates the possibilities of rethinking heritage and memory in Africa, not as fixed marketable products but as living parts of contested pasts, presents and futures. The chapters skillfully illuminate how novelists, artists, activists and ordinary people have continuously unsettled, and even subsumed, the categories that were imposed and naturalized in colonial archives. This wonderful multidisciplinary group of scholars show how engagement with the continuities of knowledge over time beyond the academy or the state, remains critical to the possibility of justice.” (Edgar C. Taylor, Lecturer in History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Makerere University).

“This is a timely response to the calls for both the decolonizing of the syllabus and of African renaissance. I cannot think of any book in the market which has this approach and depth of a variety of articles.” (John Blackings Mairi, Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Juba).

‘This book essentially poses the question: Are there lessons to draw from Africa’s rich past to steer through the present into the future? It is a riveting effort at reincarnating the rich diversity, accumulated and tested cultural heritage, with in situ logics of existence. Identities, tested philosophies, practices and aesthetics of communities are embedded on every page the reader turns. A timely and relevant book at this juncture when Africa seems to have culturally thrown the baby out with the bathwater.” (Godfrey Asiimwe, Associate Professor of Development Studies, Makerere University).