Ani names her study after a figure from Dogon myth, a being born out of a refusal of cosmic order and bent thereafter on disturbing it. The book is an avowed polemic — an attempt to put Europe inside an African-centred frame and study it as European scholarship has long studied others.

Its premise is that European dominance rested less on arms than on culture, because a culture carries rules for thinking, and imposing one on the conquered narrows what they can imagine or intend. Decolonising the mind therefore has to come first, and teaching Pan-African studies well, she says, means teaching Europe alongside them.

The analysis runs on a vocabulary she builds herself. Asili is the seed or ideological core from which a culture's creations cohere; utamawazo is thought as that core patterns it; utamaroho is its driving energy. To these she adds the cultural other, and the rhetorical ethic — high talk about conduct meant only for effect.