Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, Achille Mbembe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 280 pp., cloth $30, eBook $29.99.

Extraordinary! This is how we can characterize the present work of Achille Mbembe, a well-known and recognized African philosopher, political scientist, historian, intellectual, professor and researcher, in this work that, although it was originally published in French in 2010, only in 2014 was translated into Portuguese, a boldness by the Mulemba Editions of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Universidade Agostinho Neto (FCS-UAN – Angola), in collaboration with Edições Pedago (Portugal). Through a fluid, assertive, firm and descriptive narrative, Achille Mbembe proposes, therefore, to make a general check up on the health status of the continent, both in physical, emotional and affective levels, analyzing key issues and at the same time the sensitive, such as colonization, decolonization, miscegenation, among others. The author thus clearly delineates a rigorously well-founded and bibliographically well-documented theoretical framework, equipped with contradictions and ambiguities, which at the bottom constitute the characteristics of the continent itself, which forces us to reflect more deeply and carefully. The general objective of the work, the “interrogation about the decolonized community” (p. 19), is presented to us right in the introduction (p. 19-30) where the author reinforces the position on the need for debate and criticism around the subject matter. To this end, it begins by characterizing the concept