Lifongo Vetinde and Jean-Blaise Samou, eds. African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. vii + 186 pp. Index. $39.99. Paper. ISBN: 9781498587587.

Lifongo Vetinde and Jean-Blaise Samou have gathered together ten wide-ranging essays in a salutary reassertion of humanistic values in general and of the essential humanism of African cultures in particular.In an age of acute STEM propaganda, the instrumentalization of education systems, and the promotion of individualism worldwide, the essays in this valuable collection celebrate "African humanism as a philosophy of life that emphasizes the centrality of human beings in the universe" (1).Acknowledging the often dystopian reality of postindependence African history, the essays do not ignore the extent to which Africans have failed to live according to that philosophy's fundamental precepts of hospitality, communality, and mutual respect (as implied in the concept of ubuntu), but they insist on the continued validity of those precepts.Stemming the erosion of traditional values-which does not necessarily imply the rejection of everything Westernmight lead to "enhanc[ing] the structure and development" of African society (6).Vetinde and Samou have organized the essays into three sections: "Foundational Visions," "Power, Dystopia, and Postcolonial Violence," and "History, Trauma, and the Pedagogy of Human Rights."The first section ranges from a broad analysis of (mainly) West African orature (covering everything from jokes and adages to epic narrative) through two single-text analyses-of Zakes Mda's 1995 novel She Plays with the Darkness, and of Louis Camara's more recent Au dessus des dunes (2014; "Above the Dunes").In the latter, editor Vetinde makes the intriguing argument that apparent misanthropy can be consistent with humanism; the narrator of Camara's novel-the dog Nestor-in relating the vicious treatment he has received at the hands of human beings illustrates "the paradoxical relationship between misanthropy and humanism" by implicitly demonstrating a "longing for the emergence of a better society anchored in humanist principles" (48).The three essays in Section Two cover a similarly broad range, responding to three of the more glaring failures of humanism in recent African history: violence against children, notably, the conscription of children as soldiers by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army; the dehumanization of Black South Africans under apartheid rule; and "feymania"-the nexus of fraud, corruption, and oppression caused by the 40-plus year rule of President Paul Biya in Cameroon.Marie-Thrse Toyi's essay on recent East African fiction argues that even in the face of the extreme violence of war and genocide, ubuntu