REVIEWS OF BOOKS NICO CLOETE, PETER MAASSEN and TRACY BAILEY , editors, Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education. Cape Town: African Minds (pb £29.95 – 978 1 920677 85 5; free e-version available at <http://chet.org.za/books/knowledge-production-and-contradictory-functions- african-higher-education>). 2015, 312 pp. If there was any uncertainty, the grand scale of the African Higher Education Summit, hosted by the Senegalese government in March, emphasized that higher education (HE) has firmly returned to the continent’ s development agenda. The need for good scholarship, as substantial funding – domestic and foreign – is marshalled, is now more important than ever, particularly if the summit’ s call for a ‘high quality, massive, vibrant, diverse, differentiated, innova- tive, autonomous and socially responsible higher education sector’, to drive the African Union’ s Agenda 2063, is to be realized. This volume, which brings to- gether twenty-two contributing authors in twelve chapters, makes an important contribution to the knowledge base that an array of domestic and international policy makers, planners, capacity builders and university staff need in order to make best use of scarce resources. The book moves beyond historical and descriptive accounts, based on limited available data, to a carefullyand deeply researched investigation into the univer- sity systems of eight counties. (The authors characterize these accounts as ‘hasty studies’ followed by ‘high profile conferences with grand declarations’.) It is this commitment to painstaking data gathering (working to improve university data collection systems as the project proceeded) that marks out both this collection and the eight years of work by the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA) that underpin it. The book starts from an understanding that if Africa’ s HE is to fulfil its poten- tial as an ‘engine of development’ it must have strong, research-intensive univer- sities, founded on a strong academic core, and a clear agreement about what they are there to do. It identifies eight ‘flagship’ universities: the universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique), Ghana, Makerere (Uganda), Mauritius and Nairobi. The early chapters examine their research performance, including publishing and international col- laboration, while subsequent chapters explore the perceptions and motivations of academics in Kampala, Nairobi and Maputo. Three further chapters examine the functions of science granting councils and national HE councils, and the contributions universities make through community engagement and to civic life through developing the ‘citizenship competencies’ of students. The book’ s examination of the different ways in which universities can and do play a developmental role is its particular strength. By compiling a detailed dataset (postgraduate enrolments and graduations, academic staff and their qua- lifications, research publications and citation impact, grant income) for eight ‘flagship’ universities, it offers a way to compare some of the continent’ s leading universities in empirical terms, and from this to begin to ask deeper ques- tions about performance and about what lies behind these observed variations. Through revealing comparisons between institutions, which show that with similar ‘inputs’ universities are achieving very different ‘outputs’, it forces us to look deeper to understand the production and circulation of knowledge within HE institutions. The authors show how the eight universities are beset by contradictory and competing pressures, with little agreement or consensus between those who Africa 86 (2) 2016: 354–73 © International African Institute 2016