Uchenna Okeja. Deliberative Agency: A Study in Modern African Political Philosophy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022. $30. Paper. ISBN: 9780253059918.

Philosophy"Very few people would need more convincing that Africa's problem is rooted in political failure.This condition is already bad enough.Equally bad, if not worse, is that African thinkers recycle the same answers to the same enduring problem.Valentine Mudimbe captures the pattern of reproducing the same answer in a powerful metaphor.He compares the situation of the African intellectuals to a person trapped in an elevator that perpetually goes up and down.In principle, a single gesture would be sufficient to stop the machine, get out, and rent an apartment or room; in sum, live and experience the reality of the world.But apparently, he does not understand that the initiative to escape belongs to him.(Bennetta Jules-Rosette [1991] "Speaking about Hidden Times: The Anthropology of V. Y. Mudimbe," Callaloo 14 (4): 944-60, at 948).This metaphor aptly expresses Okeja's concern about African political philosophy in relation to Africa's political failure.Okeja has identified the practice of conceptual retrieval as one of the central problems plaguing African political thought.Conceptual retrieval is a practice in circular thinking by which thinkers reach back in the past to retrieve old concepts to attend to the challenges of the present."In their bid to solve the challenge of postcolonial Africa, [African thinkers] retrieved concepts and ideas from the traditional African past without offering a sufficient refashioning of these concepts and ideas" (61).Rather than be stuck in conceptual retrieval, African political thought, Okeja argues, ought to engage in "conceptual creativity," which, for him, is "the creative fashioning of new modes of self-understanding and engagement with the reality of what it means to be African" (138).Okeja works through what he calls "the phenomenology of the everyday experience of Africans to reflect on the nature of the challenge it represents" (11).He provides ample examples of conceptual creativity with contemporary African music, literature and arts, showing how "to refashion, rethink, and merge the paradigms of Africa's traditional and modern conceptual resources" (141).In what appears to me as the most important chapter of the book, "Palaver and Consensus-Provenance of a Conceptual Apparatus," Okeja applies his notion of conceptual creativity to the African