Modernity is the unfinished business of our times. In the case of Africa, as the scholars contributing to this volume show, the continent has been through a particularly ambivalent experience of modernity. Most work has tended to emphasize, on the one hand, its alien nature in Africa and, on the other, the ways in which Africans have resisted it. While acknowledging this tension, the authors of this volume seek to show the extent to which this very tension has been constitutive of African social reality. Modernity is understood as the basic impulse behind the construction of changing African...