This is an exceptionally comprehensive, rich and highly textured study of higher education in two regions that are rarely compared to each other, Africa and the United States written by a scholar with an unusually extensive experience with both systems. The book examines the development of higher education in the two regions focusing on the period since 2000. Divided into eight chapters, it opens with an expansive scrutiny of the exponential growth of universities in Africa and the persistent struggles for epistemic decolonisation and ends with an incisive investigation of the protracted battles over affirmative action in the United States. The chapters in between provide fascinating and insightful comparative analyses on several key issues and events since the turn of the century. Throughout, the book places trends and trajectories of higher education in the two regions in a global context given Africa’s deep insertion into the world system, America’s outsize influence over it and the entangled transnational dynamics of intellectual, ideological, and institutional flows. ISBN 978 2 38234 101 8 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is a renowned scholar of African economic and intellectual history, diaspora, gender, human rights and cultural studies, fields in which he has published about 30 books and hundreds of essays. Several of his books have won international awards. He is also a novelist and short-story writer. He is an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town and Nelson Mandela University and has received prestigious fellowships at Harvard University.
