  The heuristic value of the concept of postcolonial is not to be underappreciated, for the various instances in which the successes of defeating the classical, directly administered colonial ventures in Africa of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been compromised by situations of indirect rule, or neocolonialism, effected through economic control of the new African nation-states by Western European and U.S. American transnational capitalist enterprises and multinational organizations and agencies supposedly providing advice and aid. These compromises must be fully appreciated in order to understand the prospects for full national independence and self-determination in the areas of economic, political, social, and cultural life generally. Of decisive issue is on what terms, via which strategies, African countries will contend with emergent challenges, some of which are of magnitudes and character neither encountered nor imaginable by “traditional” African thinkers, or, even, by contemporary thinkers. Foremost are the challenges from the scourge of HIV AIDS, which is proving to have as much impact demographically, thus in other areas of life, as were depletions of populations during the centuries of export enslavement though with consequential differential impacts on age groups. Likewise challenging are questions of the priority and efficacy of armed struggle and the terms of engagement in light of recent and ongoing histories of such ventures on the African continent, too many of which involve conscripting children into armies as armed warriors. Still other challenges: the terms and practices of political governance, at the level of the state especially, as many African nations struggle against collapse or debilitating dysfunction due to corruption, crippling economic exploitation, massive underdevelopment of human capital—of females especially—scarcities of food and other vital resources, and due to campaigns of genocide as ethnic affirmations coupled with ethnic denunciations ‘go imperial’.