The Spanish and Portuguese and their American territories saw the disembarkation of almost two-thirds of all the enslaved carried from Africa. They were the first colonizers of the Atlantic and chose those areas that were best for obtaining slaves and putting them to work in the Americas. Almost every port large enough to launch a transoceanic voyage at some point entered the slave trade. Rio de Janeiro and Bahia (now Salvador) dispatched more vessels to Africa than did any European port, and overall sent out more voyages than did Europe. Thus the typical slave-trading voyage was not triangular, but rather bilateral. The Americas were the center of the slave trade because of their millennia-long isolation from the rest of the world, the inability of their Indigenous populations to resist Old World pathogens, and the very high land–labor ratios that resulted. Voyages to Africa from the Americas were quicker than those from Europe and the plantations and mines quickly generated a pool of investors willing to underpin the slave trade. In Brazil, especially, these small investors included free and enslaved Blacks, including even some enslaved crew. Close to half the merchandise traded for slaves came to be produced in the Americas rather than in Europe.

The chapter recalls and summarizes the principal arguments made in the book.

This chapter is a conclusion, a revisit from the beginning to recapture all that has been written. Analogously and methodically, the West had encountered Africa, witnessed its cultural practices but made the wrong, albeit demeaning, interpretation of it. Then came the “native,” attempting to walk them to the light through vast decades of experience and armed with an arsenal of cultural materials as evidence. The result is the challenge of the colonial matrix of power and resituating African literature at the center of African epistemology via autoethnography. Reemphasizing the points earlier made, the chapter discusses the position of self as an ambassador of the society it (self) comes from, having allowed its cultural ethos to manifest through self. Thus, everything about the individual manifests and reflects the “internal dynamics sustaining society.” This is further backed by the fact that the society shapes an individual through its “mores” and “institutions,” and thus makes it expedient to read a society through the character of an individual (an emissary), as opposed to an alien who cannot know beyond what is visible to the eyes.

This chapter highlights how colonial institutions, especially Western education through academic knowledge, have helped to sustain the “colonial matrix of power.” Its corrupted nature is reflected in the extrapolation of data from Africa (subaltern culture) and rebranding them as Western, which is to the detriment and exclusion of Africans and a support structure for Western hegemony. The solution to this imbroglio as proffered by the author is “decoloniality,” a process that combats the root of the problem seeking to “dismantle the colonial matrix of power,” and enhancing the practice of “subaltern epistemology,” which is the means to achieve what he referred to as “epistemic liberation.” The systematic process to achieving this is what the chapter sets out to do here: show how the academic sustains the colonial matrix of power, examine the biases associated with ethnography, “deconstructs the researcher’s role in it,” bridge the gap between quality research and subaltern epistemology, and lastly, how to achieve epistemic liberation using autoethnography. Using autoethnography as the methodology, the researcher explains and justifies why the researcher, for a proper interpretation of African cultural ethos, has to be the researched.

This chapter departs from a description of transformation in African language lexicography from a Eurocentric approach where dictionaries for African languages were compiled by foreigners to an Afrocentric approach in which mother-tongue speakers of African languages take responsibility for the compilation of African language dictionaries. A Eurocentric approach to dictionary compilation for African languages refers to the colonial period where dictionaries were mainly compiled by missionaries to fulfil their own lexicographic needs, that is, to spread the gospel. Afrocentric refers to dictionary compilation for African languages in Africa by Africans in a ‘postcolonial society’, that is, projects likely to thrive as compilers have sentimental attachment to it. The main focus in the chapter, however, is on the subsequent required transformation process for multilingual lexicography in Africa from a ‘postcolonial society’ to a ‘globally competitive knowledge society’, mainly in respect of a fresh start to the compilation of reference works in the electronic era. Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho) is taken as a case in point.

The Introduction outlines revolutionary leadership’s liberal view – pervasive at the time but little recognized by scholars to date – that all Cubans should be absorbed into a nuclear family, for their own good and to advance the goals of the Revolution. In order to telegraph this redefinition of morality – and its consolidation around the nuclear family – leadership and the state media sought to mobilize and modify the meaning of words related to family and identity. Using feminist gender analysis, discourse analysis, and the Gramscian concept of hegemony, the Introduction highlights how ordinary Cubans responded by constructing alternatives to the narrative espoused by the state. This analysis of how power was consolidated throughout the first decade traces two intersecting developments: the state’s steady progression from a democratic to authoritarian movement and its increasing attempts to monopolize morality, albeit with some resistance from ordinary Cubans that has heretofore been obscured from the grand narrative of Revolution. Indeed, a focus on the inconvenient truths of the government’s own past reveals how utterly the Revolution failed to impose a normative definition of morality and how reluctant citizens were to comply with state models of morality.