In order to understand Archie Mafeje's critical approach to the social sciences, one should read and understand his magnum opus, The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations. This book is Mafeje's theoretical and methodological statement on what he meant when he spoke of a search for an epistemological break and non-disciplinarity. In this book, he moves between the abstract and the concrete with great aplomb. He discusses Marxian categories with deftness and subjects them to critical scrutiny using the pre-colonial Great Lakes region as a case study. It is a highly theoretical book and the issues he discusses are complex; the complexity, however, is to be found in his ideas and not in his prose. Mafeje wrote with great facility – exact and everywhere intelligible.

Concerning this book and Mafeje's monograph The Agrarian Question, Access to Land and Peasant Responses in Sub Saharan Africa, Samir Amin says: ‘I consider these two contributions to be quite exceptional in terms of the quality of information provided and the rigour of their analysis.’ In this chapter I demonstrate the genius of Mafeje's project (the transcendence of Eurocentric knowledge systems) through a reading of his study of the interlacustrine kingdoms. My point is to show how Mafeje successfully actualised his project of advancing new methodologies and epistemologies for the social sciences in Africa. In his study of the precolonial Great Lakes, he argues that a ‘deeper ethnographic and historical awareness should give us enough confidence not to be tyrannised by concepts’.

Mafeje believed that Africa is in a good position, as a site for research, to overturn Eurocentric theories and definitions. In The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations, Mafeje furnishes an original theory of African social formations with a new methodological approach. He overturns classical anthropological and developmental theories and in so doing analyses the relationship between political and economic power. According to Mafeje, pastoralism and agriculture in pre-colonial Africa need not necessarily represent different modes of production but, rather, different modes of social existence within the same mode of production. He rejects the articulation theory of modes of production and the concept of feudalism in pre-colonial Africa and then evaluates the impact of colonialism in the Great Lakes region and its impact on African societies.