Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

Because of colonialism or the mind of the African elite there of, core African culture and tradition informing policies and solutions to Africa's problems have for long not being considered in the larger African scheme of things. In recent times, more so, as the African Renaissance process increasingly opens up, African cultural and traditional values are being used as the bedrock of policies and operations, as the weaknesses of mainly Euro-centric values worsen situations. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and others emerging in other parts of Africa, like the on-going one in Nigeria, is informed by the African tradition of healing and shaming. The United Nations secretary general, Mr Kofi Anan, and the former secretary general of the Commonwealth of Nations, Mr Emeka Anyakou, have revealed how their global diplomatic policies and operations are informed by African values of compassion, consensus, co-operation, consideration, and respect.

In a way this book comes in the wake of the Ghana's George Ayitteh's much trumpeted "African solutions for African problems." Here African political, economic and cultural landscapes are opened and discussed, informing us how they can heal much of the stupidity of today-"sacred spaces and public quarrels." The book is as a result of papers presented in a symposium by the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1996 themed Space, Culture and Society in Africa. The editors, Ezekiel Kalipeni, a teacher of geography and African studies at the University of Illinois and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, a teacher of history and African studies at the University of Illinois, say the theme came out of the observations that the rapid and complex changes that Africa is undergoing cannot be adequately explained by the conventional and narrowly-focused Eurocentric disciplinary perspectives and approaches. The case for devising more African value induced complex and integrated inter-disciplinary paradigms becomes more urgent by the day.

Compelled by this, they conceived the strategic concept of space which they tied up to physical place, historical process, social reconstruction, and imaginative landscape all grounded in African culture and tradition. In a way the book reflects the growing relevance of analytical perspectives in African Studies and the inability of Euro-centric values uncritically imposed on Africa to adequately explain the nature and dynamics of African societies and cultures. Progress to use African societies and cultures to explain Africa's troubles have been limited by intellectual interactions and conversations among social scientists. The book attempts to solve this problem by bringing together a galaxy of analysis, research and debate that the African society and culture, for long separated from each other, to connect disciplinary boundaries, as part of a continuum to hatch paradigms and research methods to better analyze and explain African histories, societies and realities.

The first part of the book explains at length the what is 'space' in the larger existence of the African and his/her culture: an active template of social existence and constitutive force of society's composition and construction. Space is everywhere, seen more in production and consumption of material and creative cultures, of the city and the literary text, of the constitution and representation of bodies, communities, and nations, and all these take place in both real and imagined geographical and social spaces. We see more of this in the changing pattern of African cities, which have been called so by academic tourists who have fixed Euro-centric views of what a "real" city should be.

This view, for long seen in the legacies of colonialism and modernism and theorizing the postcolonial patterns and processes of urban change, is changing via the struggle of different value systems--African and European-- priorities and mechanisms through the imaginations of and needs of popular African classes to reclaim and re-shape urban spaces in their own African value images. A key example is the Malawian capital city of Lilongwe where internal spatial structures were conditioned by authoritarian developmentalist model, bankrolled and inspired by South Africa and apartheid urban planning. All this, in the larger African value struggles with European ones, is changing, being increasingly dictated by African values and reality.

The second part of the book deals with the issue that landscapes are not only economies and politics, they are ritual, therapeutic and aesthetic spaces: they are cultural and medical geographies, ecological knowledge, and the spatial dynamics of social ecologies of gender and disease. We read how there is paradigmatic shift in medical geography in Africa, from the traditional approaches of cultural ecology to the development of contextual and meaning-centred perspectives. A typical case is the healing process of the Kalahari Kung, where there are inter-sections of environment and healing. This is further seen in Nigeria's Charles Anyinam ( page 147) exploration of the links between ethno-medicine and ecology, saying that ethno-medical practices, especially the creation of sacred places, have played, and continue to play, prominent role in the conservation and preservation of African ecosystems. In the battle between African native medicine, seen in many an alternative medicine's campaigns today despite the rapid boom in science and technology, and the Western ones, African ethno-medicine is coming in the forefront, for long suppressed by colonialism and its subsequent anthropocentric universal religions and the positivist and material convictions of modernism. Anyinam make a case of the therapeutic and ecological value of folk cultures and knowledges, grounded in the African's vision of nature and creation of sacred spaces.

The last section looks at the question of space and artistic production, specifically between art and space, texts and contexts, autobiography and space. We read more about this in Nigeria where artists use the notion of "body-space" in their time-lines of family memorials and artists' representation of sacral objects where the African inhabit spaces, inscribe value to such spaces, and internalize the articulated systems within. Added to the above is how the African imagine his nation-state. In Kwaku Larbi Korang's piece, he explores the spatial history of the African nation. He raises some questions in the context of the collapse of some African states and the paralysis of others: "Where did the nation go wrong? Where, then, might it recover ground? A resolution of these questions hinges on asking still others. Who imagines the nation and in what capacity? What is invested in this imagining and hence in what terms is the nation couched? How have circumstances, in allowing the nation to be imagined in certain ways, also constrained this imagining in certain other ways?" Korang says the answers in all these questions rest in the cultural project or narrativity and the historical spatial ordering of the constituent parts of the African nation.