Have you ever wondered what the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP) and the Australasia Review of African Studies (ARAS) logo stands for? Photo acknowledgement: Chris Malheiro.

The logo is the head of an Ọ́bà (King), also referred to as the Great Head (Ùhúnmwèlaò), a bronze sculpture created by artists of the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria. The art piece is part of more than a thousand metal plaques and sculptures known as the Benin Bronzes that decorated the royal palace of the Kingdom.

A picture of the Great Head has been the symbol of AFSAAP and ARAS for decades. It represents the definition of African Studies, because it is a physical and artistic representation of Africa, or basically it is African knowledge. The definitions of African Studies that I am referring to are:

“African Studies as a concept is understood to encompass a wide range of disciplines that take Africa as a subject of study. The field has evolved over time to include a range of approaches across a wide portfolio, including inter alia:  political sciences, economics, history, art, human sciences, linguistics, theology, law, and health sciences. Therefore, African Studies may entail health education in Africa, African politics and law, African philosophy and religion, African economic studies, African environmental studies, African history, African sociology and anthropology, African linguistics and art” (AFSAAP, 2024).

“African Studies is a formally organised academic study of the continent of Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest to the modern times. It is multidisciplinary and involves studying the history, religion, art, music and dance, literature (and orature), demography and technology among others. These subjects can be studied independently or together” (Opare, 2022, 2023, Koforidua Technical University, Ghana).

“As a discipline, African Studies attempts to produce knowledge on the meanings, manifestations, and possible trajectories of the idea of “Africa,” center African subjects, and implement a methodology founded on the pluriversal ethos of African cultures. It is at the same time an epistemic stance, a political intervention, and a method of analysis. From Pan-Africanism to the Negritude movement and, more recently, Afropolitanism, Afrofuturism, Critical African Feminism, Motherhood Studies, and Decoloniality, etc., African Studies has foregrounded African agency, questioned centuries of epistemicide that presented Africa as the land where the sun never rises, and put forth a pluridisciplinary, inclusive, and participatory approach to knowledge production that question the limits of Euro-Modern disciplinarity (African Studies Association of Africa, ASAA, 2024).

“Following the pluriversal ethos of the griot tradition, the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) sets bridges across the humanities, thereby emphasizing the need to understand African phenomena from multiple perspectives. Moreover, researchers often engage with local communities, privileging African knowledges and practices and using methodologies sensitive to cultural contexts and power dynamics. For all these reasons, ASAA can be schematized as an intellectual and political commitment to reclaim, validate, and expand the understanding of African intellectual traditions and cultural practices and intervene in concrete ways in the good lives of African peoples” (ASAA, 2024).

I have in bold what I see as the most important concepts in these definitions, which are:

• Take Africa as a subject of study.
• Organised academic study.
• Possible trajectories of the idea of “Africa,” center African subjects, and implement a methodology founded on the pluriversal ethos of African cultures.
• An epistemic stance, a political intervention, and a method of analysis.
• Has foregrounded African agency, questioned centuries of epistemicide that presented Africa as the land where the sun never rises.
• Question the limits of Euro-Modern disciplinarity.
• Pluriversal ethos of the griot tradition.
• Privileging African knowledges and practice.
• Commitment to reclaim, validate, and expand the understanding of African intellectual traditions and cultural practices.

Based on these definitions, do we have African Studies in Australasia? I don’t know but the book chapter titled The State of African Studies in Australia (Lyons, previous editor of ARAS and Dimock) will help you reach an answer to this critical question. Another important question is What constitutes African Studies Theory? This is a simple question that can still be answered after reading the same research cited in the previous sentence, but it requires a thoughtful examination. I am hoping to contribute some answers to these questions in a future editorial.

Back to The Great Head of Ọ́bà, that thousands of stolen African artifacts are still stacked in museums and private homes in Western countries, challenges Africanists to be louder in their call for accelerated decolonisation. However, the fact that we have the Head as a cherished symbol of AFSAAP and ARAS reminds us of our role as academics – to advance African epistemic development by valuing African knowledge contained in its philosophy (largely Ubuntu), theories, artifacts, orature, literature, and numerous other sources.