‘Africa clearly needs histories and philosophies of technology, but which ones?’ editor Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga asks in the volume, What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (7). In nine chapters, a group of interdisciplinary scholars provides compelling answers to this question from the deep past to the near present through a focus on ‘Intellectual Africa’. This term references the notion that we ‘should take Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge’ (ix). For Mavhunga, this means scholars should not only emphasize the ability of African societies to actively appropriate, make, and remake the ‘white’ tools and ideas most readily associated with science, technology, and innovation (STI) in Western scholarship (7). Rather, Intellectual Africa also serves two other purposes that emphasize the ‘from Africa’ in the title.

First, the stress on Intellectual Africa provides an opportunity to reframe the definition and constitution of STI, in scholarship and in policy. ‘The dilemma of knowledge production in Africa’, Mavhunga observes, ‘centers on how its structures, practices, and concepts came to be informalized while inbound European ones were rendered formal’ (10). To combat narrow Eurocentric definitions of STI — and their privileging of northern spaces, timelines, and ontologies — the editor calls upon scholars of all disciplines to reconceptualize familiar terms and stories from deeper historical perspectives, from an era before societies from the Global North made monopolistic claims upon science, technology, and innovation.

Second, Intellectual Africa asks authors to move beyond a critique of Western narratives to write and research, theorize, and plan from the continent without seeking validation from external reference points. This point is the book's most important contribution. Without universalizing about STI from or within Africa, Mavhunga calls scholars to explore these topics through ‘African self-perception’ (27). The volume thus pushes back against ‘Africa rising’ narratives that position the continent's societies as relevant knowledge communities only when they adopt the tools and institutions deemed important by foreign modernizers and African elites.

The first four chapters highlight the long history of African innovation. D.A. Masolo's opening essay uses Maasai spear design and production and Egyptian mummification to illustrate that knowledge production has always been present in African societies. ‘Innovation is not about breaking Guinness records’, he writes, but ‘about novel means to tackle persistent problems as they affect all […] levels of community and its projections’ (36). Mavhunga follows by considering chimurenga, a Shona term most often translated as ‘struggle’ and well-known for its association with anticolonial resistance. He approaches chimurenga as a kind of ‘spiritually guided warfare’, a practice that is limited not to elites, as suggested by colonial resistance narratives, but which offers a means to explore various vernacular archives and philosophies from a deeper past that pertain to knowing, making, creating, and healing. Consequently, Mavhunga argues against diminishing chimurenga to a ‘secondary language whose principal concepts must simply be translated to English and consigned to a glossary’ (46).

Interestingly, the next chapter plays with an English word common to STI scholarship: laboratory. Spaces in which African actors produce knowledge through ‘experimentation, improvisation, and adaptation’, such as historical sites of metal and pottery production, constitute laboratories, Shadreck Chirikure writes (77). But instead of simply seeking an African equivalent for a Western concept, Chirikure evokes ‘laboratory’ to emphasize the different values and philosophies, as sites of innovation, found in industrial European laboratories versus African ones. Geri Augusto extends this idea through the concepts of diaspora and bondage. Using three categories of botanical knowledge — plants of bondage, limbo plants, and liberation flora — she challenges the colonial visualization and organization of plant knowledge by constructing a ‘seed assemblage’ and slave garden at her home university (80). The process asks visitors and readers to recognize slaves’ roles as innovators and categorizers of expert knowledge while also offering a history of plant science anchored in Africa and its diaspora.

These opening chapters provide an efficient yet robust response to decades of scholarship that assumed Africa's passive role in narratives of world history and which often cited STI themes to justify this interpretation. Showing that scholars cannot understand African, world, or STI history by confining themselves to conventional definitions of science, technology, or innovation, the chapters also provide narrative and conceptual models for writing histories of science and technology from Africa and its diasporas.

Focusing on more recent times, the latter half of the book centers African actions and thoughts in policy, research, and design. Katrien Pype's contribution on Kinsasha looks at ‘being smart in the city’ not through top-down conceptions about ‘smart cities’, but through actor categories and Lingala language (98–99). She illustrates that vernaculars of innovation and urban expertise extend beyond technological acts to inform and constitute various forms of urban sociality — including an interesting case of a pastor-turned-radio repairman who describes his technical work through older blacksmithing analogies. Using a broader lens but also focused on bottom-up movements, Ron Eglash and Ellen K. Foster examine the intersection of technology and ‘generative justice’ (124). They make a compelling case for approaching African maker movements as alternatives to the bureaucracy-heavy modernization projects of the 1960s and 1970s.

Readers encounter a detailed example of this approach in Toluwalogo Odumosu's ‘Making Mobiles African’, where the author cautions against normative approaches to both appropriation and technological leapfrogging. Using terms that, at first glance, seem familiar to readers — credit, landline, and mobile line — Odumosu demonstrates that Nigerian engineers had to respond to the particularities of user culture as the former made and repaired communication systems. The two remaining chapters call for policymakers to work with extant examples of African innovation. For Chux Daniels, this requires not only deep knowledge of indigenous capacities, but also ‘the need for new and/or alternative measurement indicators to capture the full extent of innovation in Africa’ (177).

The volume is a must-read for historians seeking an introduction to STI scholarship and for those seeking a model for how African history can and should shape interdisciplinary science and technology scholarship. Compact and accessible, yet wide-ranging in time, place, and topic, the volume will help undergraduate and graduate students understand and re-think major themes in STI history.