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

Uchenna Okeja's book begins with a reappraisal of Africa's postcoloniality not as a struggle for emancipation from colonial oppression but as the unquenched yearning for freedom from Africa's own political elite.This condition, Okeja notes, having plagued the continent-almost without exception-since political independence in the late 1950s, is one of "political failure," and it requires, for its solution, a distinctly new orientation in African political philosophy.It is not, Okeja points out, that things do not go wrong in other places.However, the fact that the everyday experience of most, if not all, Africansdespite all their diversity-is one of a persistent misery grounded in an individual powerlessness defines, for Okeja, the sense in which the general, and generalizable, mode of politics has failed in postcolonial Africa.But it is not only that politics, or the practice of political governance, has failed, it is further that the very political or public culture of many African societies is, as a result, in deep crisis.Certainly, the failure that pervades the daily infrastructure of African life seeps, unsurprisingly, out of a wider political system besieged by crippling international debt, bankrupt judiciaries, and ineffective bureaucracies.However, while the system busily perpetuates itself, ordinary civilians are left in a state of political inertia whereby their collective self-understanding provides little resource for developing new ideological meaning about the kind of lives and political futures they might wish.Instead, life is a constant firefight, and the task of political imagination is left to local and foreign elites that have none.For Okeja, the task posed by all this to a specifically African political philosophy is to restore the everyday agency of Africans in their own public experience.It would be too simple to criticize the author for underappreciating the continued impact of colonial structures on Africa's politics.If Okeja sidesteps this focus on the oppressive persistence of colonial subjection, it is not because he does not think it important but, rather, that it obscures thinking on new forms and modes of political being.If African political philosophy, Africanist political science, and almost all other areas of Africa-focused study have failed to improve the continent's circumstance, it is, surely, not because much effort has not been spent diagnosing cause after cause, colonization included, for Africa's persistently deflated predicament.What, therefore, are we missing?