The teaching of African topics across the disciplines has seen a significant expansion over the past few decades, especially in North American, African, and European higher education. Once African-centered courses were found only in those few institutions that offered graduate degrees in African studies. Such courses are now scattered across departments of history, anthropology, literature, economics, and others, at almost every university, including regional teaching institutions and small liberal arts colleges. While African studies no doubt has more growing to do, the expansion to date is certainly a good thing.

In their newly-released volume entitled Teaching Africa, editors Brandon D. Lundy and Solomon Negash set out the ambitious goals to help not only expand but also to improve the teaching of African topics. As Lundy states in the very first sentence of the book, ‘This book aims to transform the disparate and often ineffective ways that teachers teach Africa in American higher education and to bridge the knowledge gap between the realities and the perceptions about the continent.’ (p. 1) Further, the editors state that the book responds ‘directly to the ongoing institutional shift from insular to multifocal education in African studies’. To this end, they have collected 22 chapters from 28 contributors. These chapters are further organized into three parts: first, ‘Situating Africa: Concurrent-Divergent Rubrics of Meaning’; second, ‘African Arts: Interpreting the African “Text”’; and, third, ‘Application of Approaches: Experiencing African Particulars’. Notably, each of these parts is presented as part of a Harold Bloom's tripartite taxonomy of learning, wherein the reader/instructor/student begins with ‘preparation’, proceeds to ‘feeling/heart’, and concludes with ‘a leap … from theory to practice’.

How successful is Teaching Africa in attaining its own stated ends? How useful is it to those seeking to improve and expand their teaching of things African? Overall, the brief individual chapters are well conceived and realized. Perusing the text and reading the chapters which catch one's fancy will certainly be worth the time of many an instructor and those who choose to read chapters from disciplines other than their own may well develop some useful chops for ‘multifocal education’. Indeed, it is a pleasure to see just what sort of creative approaches scholars of Africa are employing to communicate with students about the diversity and complexity of the place we call Africa.

Lundy sets out the relationship of each chapter to the book as a whole and to the corresponding ‘part’ in the book's introduction, the largest single component of the text. The text nevertheless seemed to this reviewer to be more an assemblage of pieces than a coherent whole. While the editors propose numerous ways the book will address failings in the teaching of Africa, they focus on answering questions that are stated or implied in the various chapters rather than explicitly stated and addressed in the introduction. The fact that both the introduction and conclusion are actually culled and adapted from a previous publication and presentation, respectively, may also account in part for the text's lack of a clear gestalt.

Another weakness of the book is in its rather loose approach to audience. No doubt hoping to appeal to as many potential readers and users as possible, the editors stress that this text is suitable not only for ‘tertiary’ educators, but also for secondary teachers and ‘diplomats, travelers, reporters, tourists, missionaries and businesspersons’ (p. 10). That said, the language of Teaching Africa is classic Africanist-speak. Take, for example, the titles of the text's three parts – each of which sounds like a panel title designed to bind together a set of independently submitted papers at the African Studies Association annual conference. If Africanists want to reach a wider audience, we must learn to express information in a way that identifies problems and communicates answers in laymen's terms, not in a way that seeks to impress our peers.

In conclusion, there are many good teaching ideas to be found in Teaching Africa. However, because of the limited guidance provided by the editors in giving meaning to and organizing the collection, identifying the problems and questions these ideas will answer is largely left to the reader.