Page 20 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 12

BOOK REVIEW
MY AFRIKA

Anselm Adodo and Ronnie Lessem:

AFRIKOLOGY: DECONSTRUCTING AND
RECONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE IN AFRICA

Publisher: Beacon Academic, Manchester, UK
Release date: May 2021
Reviewed by Dr Tony Bradley

can think of no more im- This exercise could not be timelier. pologist and agriculturalist, famously
portant time than the current The current culture wars - which wrote.
one in which to welcome this have sparked an acute phase of
I important book on the study violence in the United States and is Not that establishing the nature
of African identity, culture, research, threatening to spill over into other of African heritage is easy. The
and enterprise. parts of the world, not least the UK, case of Professor Jessica Krug, a
where I live and work - has focused white Jewish woman from Kansas,
Ronnie Lessem and Anselm Ado- on the simple, irreducible fact that who posed as a black person of
do turn their attention to Africa's Black Lives Matter. Of course, all African diaspora heritage, and who
cultures and the economics that that black lives, as all human cultures, taught on race and identity, brought
culture has, in the past, and is, in have their origins Out of Africa, as questions of cultural appropriation
the present, distinctively generating. Karen Blixen, the Danish anthro- into sharp relief earlier in 2020. Her

20 | we tell the true afrikan story