African sociological review, pp. 221-230

If you teach sociology, study Africa, or wonder why imported theories keep failing elsewhere, this collection shows what decolonising a discipline actually requires. It is dense, citation-heavy academic writing, so it rewards readers who want the primary arguments rather than summaries. Graduate students and policy researchers will get the most from it.

1. 1Opening essays

   Stop borrowing Europe's sociology

   A scholar looks at the sociology taught in African universities and finds syllabus after syllabus built on Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, with African societies appearing only as data to test European theories. The essays in this section document how that habit took root during colonial rule, when African institutions were studied through administrators' categories. The outcome the authors call for is a discipline that starts from African social forms and builds theory from them.

   The idea

   The critique is not that European theory is wrong but that it answers questions nobody on the continent is asking. A sociology built elsewhere treats African kinship, religion, and economies as deviations from a norm rather than systems in their own right. What surprises readers is how old this argument is and how slowly institutions have changed.

   Try this: Audit one syllabus or reading list you use and count how many authors are African versus European.

2. 2Historical essays

   Colonial anthropology's long shadow

   The section walks through how colonial administrations commissioned ethnographies designed to make African societies legible for governance. Tribe, chief, and customary law became fixed categories, frozen in ethnographic present tense. When independence came, these categories did not die; they migrated into textbooks and policy papers. The authors show scholars now working to prise African social analysis free from that inherited vocabulary.

   The idea

   Categories built for colonial administration outlive the administrations that made them. Once a term like tribe enters the archive, later researchers inherit it as neutral description. Recognising that inheritance is the first step to asking different questions about African social organisation.

   Try this: Next time you read a report on an African country, check whether it uses colonial-era categories without questioning them.

3. 3Kinship section

   Kinship still organises the continent

   Case studies follow families whose obligations stretch across rural villages and city neighbourhoods. A wage earner in town is not an individual consumer; he is a node in a network of claims from siblings, elders, and in-laws. The studies show remittances, fostered children, and funeral obligations functioning as a social insurance system no state provides. The outcome is a picture of African urban life that Western individualist models simply cannot parse.

   The idea

   Kinship operates as infrastructure: it moves money, raises children, and absorbs shocks. Economists who model African households as nuclear units misread the data because the unit of analysis is wrong. What surprises outsiders is how flexible these networks are, adapting to migration and wage labour rather than dissolving under them.

   Try this: Map your own obligations for one month: who claims your money, time, or care, and what do you claim back?

4. 4Urban economy essays

   The informal economy is not chaos

   Researchers spend months in African city markets and workshops cataloguing what officials call the informal sector. They find rules, credit networks, apprenticeship systems, and dispute resolution running without state sanction. Street traders negotiate territories; mechanics train apprentices through structured ladders. The studies conclude that formality and informality are not opposites but intertwined systems the state alternately taxes and ignores.

   The idea

   Calling an economy informal describes the state's blindness, not the economy's disorder. These sectors generate employment and innovation under conditions formal firms could not survive. The surprise is how much regulation exists informally, enforced by reputation and guild-like associations rather than courts.

   Try this: Spend an hour observing an informal market or gig platform near you and list the rules everyone follows that no law requires.

5. 5Closing essays

   Sociology's African future

   The final essays take stock of a generation of African sociologists publishing, teaching, and building departments against funding droughts and political pressure. They catalogue journals, conferences, and research networks now linking the continent. The argument lands on institutional power: without African-controlled journals and graduate programmes, the borrowing habit returns by default. The outcome is a roadmap for sustaining a discipline on its own terms.

   The idea

   Decolonising knowledge is an institutional project, not just a theoretical one. Theories change when the people funded to produce them change. What surprises readers is how much infrastructure already exists and how fragile it remains without sustained investment.

   Try this: Subscribe to or cite one African-based journal in your field this month.

Sociologists, African studies scholars, and anyone teaching theory courses who wants the decolonisation argument from primary sources. Best for graduate-level readers comfortable with academic prose.

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