We also appreciate the coordinating team for the Eastern Africa Agency, Social and Gender Norms Learning Collaborative (EALC)-comprising the Institute of Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) at Makerere University; Impact and Innovations Development Centre (IIDC); Care International-Uganda; and the Agency for All Project for their leadership in fostering a platform for shared learing and action.

This important collection demonstrates the possibilities of rethinking heritage and memory in Africa, not as fixed marketable products but as living parts of contested pasts, presents and futures. The chapters skillfully illuminate how novelists, artists, activists and ordinary people have continuously unsettled, and even subsumed, the categories that were imposed and naturalized in colonial archives. This wonderful multidisciplinary group of scholars show how engagement with the continuities of knowledge over time, beyond the academy or the state, remains critical to the possibility of justice.” (Edgar C. Taylor, Lecturer in History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Makerere University).

This is a timely response to the calls for both the decolonizing of the syllabus and of African renaissance. I cannot think of any book in the market which has this approach and depth of a variety of articles.” (John Blackings Mairi, Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Juba).

This book essentially poses the question: Are there lessons to draw from Africa’s rich past to steer through the present into the future? It is a riveting effort at reincarnating the rich diversity, accumulated and tested cultural heritage, with in situ logics of existence. Identities, tested philosophies, practices and aesthetics of communities are embedded on every page the reader turns. A timely and relevant book at this juncture when Africa seems to have culturally thrown the baby out with the bathwater.” (Godfrey Asiimwe, Associate Professor of Development Studies, Makerere University).

This publication brings together issues that educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the Global South are currently grappling with, in the hope of widening the global discourse on these and related matters. It is worth noting that whereas the Global South faces the gravest challenges in educating its citizens and is the arena for a wide range of educational experiments, voices of researchers from Africa are almost muted in the global discourse on educational research, policy and practice. Rather than leaving it to the few international experts to speak for them, this publication provided a platform for contemporary scholars and researchers from or in Africa to share their views with the rest of the world.