This is a very important book. It deals with a crucial issue of our times of political crisis, namely: is emancipatory politics still possible today and does it have historical references? Or put differently: can we think anew a politics of universal human emancipation? The Marxist political vision has collapsed; attempts to recalibrate it are in difficulty as they lack historical references. The recourse to neo-liberal ideology has made it difficult to even conceptualise the universality of humanity. In fact, due to deep economic crises such as the aggravation of human inequality, neo-liberalism has given rise to fascistic tendencies in thought throughout the world.

Politics, when it has been thought, has failed to detach itself from the determination of locality and the identity of the subject. In addition, the fact that present dominant forms of capitalist legitimation include religious or spiritual figures (Islamic and other fundamentalisms) generates even more difficulties and uncertainties. Wars are being fought under religious flags. The Arab Spring which generated tremendous hope, as a ‘new beginning of history’, has either failed – given rise to a military dictatorship in Egypt – has run into an unfinished terrorist crisis in Libya, or has faded into a variant of Western democracy in Tunisia.

The book is also a real event in the knowing and thinking of the politics of emancipation through the study of the global history of African peoples’ struggles for liberation – liberty, equality, freedom, independence and dignity – that is African peoples’ historical contribution to universal emancipatory politics. This area of study has been often marginalised if not silenced altogether, partly because thinking has often been denied to African people. And these people, due to deep alienation, have often simply adopted models thought elsewhere. This, of course, does not mean that there have been no experiences of emancipatory politics by African people. The author does bring into focus some new ways of looking at African history, no longer making colonial history the ‘pivot’ of such history and giving voice to the ‘wretched of the earth’.

The author uses some of the most creative and inspiring ideas or categories produced in the contemporary theoretical conjuncture; those particularly found in the conceptual philosophy of Alain Badiou and the nominal anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus.