There is arguably no region of the world that has been the object of more intellectual contempt, intellectual derision, and intellectual disregard than Africa. Scholars have long documented the dark, dreary, pernicious, and primitive “Africanism” some argue has been a (if not the) defining pillar of philosophizing, literature, criticism, and historiography in the North Atlantic for a long time. Emerging along with intentionally misconstrued yet ubiquitous constructions of blackness as other than human—negative ideas about the continent of Africa and its supposed intellectual vacuity are part of a widely circulating discourse that Kurtis Keim dubbed “mistaking Africa.” In the United States, what Toni Morrison called “American Africanism” is so routine and mundane, it is hardly notable that very few courses on African philosophy and rhetoric are offered in American colleges and universities. To witness how the epistemic disregard of African rhetorics and philosophies plays out in these familiar confines, just peruse the volumes of Philosophy & Rhetoric since its inception in 1968. Such epistemic disregard is part of the “colonizer's model of the world,” to borrow a phrase from J. M. Blaut, a model that posits Western Europe and North America as the putative center of intellectual, historic, and cultural development of humankind. The upshot of this misperception has been that for too long Africa and Africa's relation to the global emergence and circulation of ideas has been severely undertheorized, particularly in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including in philosophy and rhetoric.At the same time, what it means to live (or try to live) the good life also remains a perennially vexing problem in a number of disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, and religious studies. Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life attends to Africa's role in the intellectual world by rhetoricizing theories about the good life. Groundwork faults philosophical abstractionism for producing theories of both the good life and intellectual life in Africa that are too brittle, too idealistic, and too far removed from practical reality. The book's unstated goal, it seems, is to recommend rhetoric's penchant for particular contexts, contingency, and historicity to social theorists. In order to do that, Ochieng recovers the contingency and historicity specific to both the good life and sociopolitics in African societies. He convincingly demonstrates that the meanings of both are negotiated on an ongoing basis, and that both are shot through with contingency and interanimation. To wit, this is not a book about the good life alone nor about Africanism per se, but one whose central arguments about intellectual practice turn on the rhetorical nature both of ideas about Africa and of some of the best regarded theories of the good life. The argument in Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life is that in order to extricate both the good life and Africa from misbegotten understandings, we must rethink intellectual work away from the orthodoxy of metaphysical thought and toward the recursivity and contingency of orthopraxy. In pressing his challenge, Ochieng is undaunted: many luminaries of both African (Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Ajume Wingo, Achille Mbembe, Jean-François Bayart) and Western (Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Žižek, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Nussbaum) thought are subject to his reproach. But the goal is not just a vain naming and shaming of these individuals. Ochieng seeks instead to refigure any polarities between African and North Atlantic thought as indications of the incompleteness and irreducible entanglement of both thought systems in the catalog of human thought and practice. For him, the telos of the good life is figured rhetorically; it emerges from conditions in particular contexts.Towards this end, Ochieng offers a program for doing philosophy that is grounded in the contingencies of everyday life. Groundwork develops this program in four chapters. Chapter 1 argues that an empirical social ontology is the best framework for investigating “the good society,” which is the ideal location for the experience of the good life. The good society, Ochieng argues, is an “emergent normativity” (57), an intransitive that develops in and at the confluence of performative particulars that comprise the ontological makeup of the social: subjectivity, power, agency, and normativity (12–58). Specifically, the good society emerges through an analysis of the “interanimation of historiography”; the activation and expansion of political imagination via the (re)articulation of the political; political practice that foregrounds lived experiences over the deus ex machina of transcendentalist and metaphysically imbued political theory; and the enactment of restructurative justice through the constant remaking of the political, social, and cultural. Of these, restructurative justice best demonstrates the turn away from the abstract and universal and toward the concrete and particular. Restructurative justice obligates members of the good society to observe “egalitarianism; democratic practices; and relationships of solidarity” (90). Anchored in the recognition that structural and historical violence have affected people differently, restructurative justice is, in the first position, concerned with unsettling the structural and historical “entrenchment of privilege and power” (91). Calls to explore financial and other compensation for American descendants of enslaved persons advocated in House Bill 40 of the U.S. Congress and by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrate this first commitment of restructurative justice. Additionally, restructurative justice upholds commitments to both democratic practices and solidarity, which Ochieng defines as a concern with enabling members of one's society who are otherwise unable to exert their political will to do so. This is how the terrain of the good life is cultivated.In chapter 2, Ochieng details his theory of the political in African societies, which borrows from and expands upon Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes. For Bakhtin, chronotope denotes the inextricable interwovenness of time and space. To apprehend the dynamic contingency of sociopolitics in Africa (and the good life), Ochieng infuses Bakhtin's chronotope with a “third dimension in the intersection of space and time: that of agency” (13). Adding agency to chronotope allows Ochieng to show “how structures are emergent from within history (time) as this is imbricated and bounded by horizons (space) of the possible (agency)” (13). Ochieng illustrates this argument in chapter 2, which works through an admittedly incomplete catalog of ten chronotopes in African politics. Through each theme, Ochieng returns to one point: politics in Africa is emergent from a diverse series of practices that are configured and constrained in history—they cannot be fully understood apart from ground contexts. He illustrates the chronotopics in African politics with examples from across the continent (Mali in the west, Kenya in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center, and South Africa and Zimbabwe in the south). This chronotopic account of politics in Africa highlights “the diversity of political formations” and foregrounds “the irreducibly plural and multi-dimensional task of the political imagination” (181) attendant to the good life.Chapters 3 and 4 pivot away from politics to ethics. In chapter 3, Ochieng argues that only a meta-ethics that grows out of the social ontology and chronotopics as developed in the preceding chapters is appropriate for the contemplation of the good life. His meta-ethics “is less that of an immovable and irresistible arché and more of a web of thick relationships; an emergent patchwork of interpretive practices and a cluster of gripping values that have come to be appreciated in light of history” (193). Chapter 4 returns at last to the motivating problem of how to theorize the good life from the standpoint of interanimation, social ontology, and articulation. On this point, Ochieng argues forcefully that the good life, if it is to square with the lived realities of humans everywhere, cannot be imbued in transcendence. He contends instead, and convincingly, that the best revered models of the good life that have echoed loudest across the centuries—the hero, the saint, and the citizen—are hollow and brittle because the authority each commands issues not from the mundaneness of everyday life but out of the abstractions of theistic, mythic, and political thinking. Thus, the good life appears in much of philosophical and religious discourse as an “ideal normativity” premised on hypostatic principles that inflect away from the practicality of social ontology. Whether it is framed as a quest for a metaphysical telos (hero) or defined by universalizing abstractionism (citizen), or as emanating from origins (saint) as nebulous as they are mythical and mystical, the good life—as it is figured in the saint, the hero, and the citizen—offers “no articulation of the social ontology from which ethical action is intelligible and is effectuated” (229). Rather than draw our ethical projects from these facile personae, Ochieng urges an ethics conditioned on ground projects, which themselves “are emergent from particular forms of social relationships” and in which “justice is instantiated in and through” (229).While its central argument—that the quest for the good life is best explained as emergent and that philosophers and rhetoricians should so orient their projects—is compelling, this case, as it is advanced in Groundwork, will strike some as familiar. Readers familiar with Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, Comaroff and Comaroff's Theory from the South, Nathan Stormer's work on articulation and taxis, or Stuart Hall's work on articulation and race in The Fateful Triangle, for example, will hear familiar refrains in Groundwork. In addition, as strong a case as Groundwork makes for ground-based philosophy, it leaves a few questions unanswered. Take Ochieng's broadside against Western philosophy's proclivity for the transcendental and universal, for example. As he rightly observes, this “transcendalist delusion,” as Linda Martín Alcoff has labeled it, fails on two counts: for one, it often projects philosophers' perspectives as a “view from nowhere” (3), a neutral episteme, one that, by some ineluctable stroke of genius, is unsullied by the caprices of subjective and context-bound doxa. Second, perhaps as a consequence of the preference for transcendentalism in philosophy, it results in a willful inattention to the particularities of conditions on the ground, manifested in philosophy's preference for the abstract over the concrete (save for the cherry-picked anecdote proffered here and there). Thus, Ochieng intones in his introduction that “the very idea of rooting philosophical discourse in particular subjectivity and social context” constitutes “a betrayal of the transcendence and universality of philosophical questions” the field considers to be its purview. Yet following this line of reasoning leads to the twin challenges of delineating contexts (what to include and what to exclude in identifying a particular context), and of distinguishing different localities from each other (how to distinguish between interrelation and idiosyncrasy of contexts). In addition, recent contributions by African political theorists have moved beyond the weaknesses in Jean-François Bayart's “politics of the belly” documented in Groundwork and toward dynamic models constructed from multiple local contexts (e.g., the concepts of “pluri-politics and the politics of “ID-ology”), and in African historiography (here, one thinks of the challenges “patriotic” history in southern Africa raised by historians influenced by Terence Ranger). But these points need not dampen the appeal of the arguments laid out in Groundwork. They suggest instead a possible way of building on this project by exploring social philosophy through specific cases. This book invites us to vistas of possibility of philosophy and rhetoric's entanglements as we start our thinking by working from the ground up.