The Challenge of African Potentials

"The ‘African Potentials’ project has creatively released the perspective of African agency to the world audience, encouraging more positive imagery of Africa. It unpacks genuine African abilities based on indigenous knowledge as well as local contexts and institutions."

"Through bringing distinguished scholars from Africa and Asia together, this book discusses the African continent’s potential from many perspectives, including language, education, religion and other fields of humanities, which have often been ignored."

"Something new is expected to arise from the contact between Asia and Africa. A close intellectual cooperation amongst Asian and African scholars will blaze a trail in shaping the future world order. I welcome this book as a collaborative model."

"This collection of articles showcases some of the results from the works of Japanese and African researchers in a rare but ideal collaborative effort spanning almost a decade. Both African and Japanese researchers attempt to reconstruct concepts such as ‘informality’ and ‘futurity’ and turn them into something more convivial. In this sense, this collection offers a stimulating ideological experiment on the creation of new intellectual space."

"This stimulating compilation undertakes a unique approach – providing us with a solution to Africa’s contemporary problems from Japanese-African perspectives. This compilation is the outcome of their endeavours. One of the merits of this compilation is that it pursues a praxeological approach stressing latent problem-solving abilities, that is African potentials, for addressing diverse challenges that face contemporary Africa."

"The volume The Challenge of African Potentials is an eclectic mix of contributions from African and Japanese scholars based on field work in different African contexts. Adopting a humanistic and empathetic approach to African lives and futures, the volume draws some parallels from Japan’s history, culture and experiences with Western universals and standards to urge space for the multiple knowledge systems, openness and creativity in Africa to be used to realise its potentials. It is to be hoped that this collaboration will develop into dynamic exchanges that also enable African scholars to study Japanese societies and people firsthand."

"This is a brilliant introduction to the power and potentials of informality in contemporary Africa. Open, broad and convivial, it challenges the usual images of backward Africa projected through the lenses of Western modernity. Play, parties, laughter and satire create alternative space for life and passages for development. It is a rare and eye-opening account on everyday life in African societies through a decade-long collaborative work of African and Asian activists and scholars."