The African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK) is delighted to announce that Dr Tosin Gbogi is the winner of the 2026 ASAUK Best Book Prize. The announcement was first made at the ASAUK conference dinner at the University of Durham, on 12 September 2026.
Tosin Gbogi, who is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, received the award for his book Nigerian Hip-Hop: Race, Knowledge, and the Poetics of Resistance, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2025.
According to the jury, Gbogi’s text is entirely engrossing in its critical examination and engagement with the Nigerian hip hop scene. We particularly valued his intensive analysis of Hip Hop and ‘rap’ in Africa, from its historic-anthropological origins through to the early 1970s to the present day. Written from an academic perspective, it is also very accessible to the general Africanist reader. Gbobi has a particularly engaging style in which he invites the reader to become part of his inquiry into this music genre, considering not only the historical, but also the socio-economic and political context of Nigeria situated in a wider, Americo-Western contextual world view. He also considers key themes such as gender, race, and from a cultural theory perspective, ‘roots’ colonisation and decolonisation. Nigerian Hip Hop makes for a rich, and constantly challenging read, thanks to its interdisciplinary angle, journalistic reportage, its creative engagement with postcolonial theory, and incisive analysis of African and American histories of music and musical culture. As Gbogi captures it himself in his book:
The lively debates that the culture fosters on the terms of Africa’s insertion into the modern world
In these rhymes of resistance memory mounts remembrance
Asking for a world without the violence of Empire
Can’t you see the ground is shifting?
Runner ups
The prize jury also announces two runner ups to the prize:
Nana Osei Quarshie, Africa Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to Return (University of Chicago Press).
African Pharmakon is a close and original interdisciplinary study investigating mental health, its treatment and location in Africa, specifically Ghana. Adopting an ethnographic and anthropological focus, this text is highly original in its use of these devices to understand what mental illness is within different contexts. This takes us from its historical genesis in traditional cultures, to postcolonial understandings and uses as a vehicle to frame local-national socio-political activity. Quarshie weaves an intricate narrative which engages with the different strands of his scholarship, including use of archival material and more current literature and events analysis in his text. This text unlocks a hitherto unexplored framework for the analysis of mental health systems in Africa and arguably across other continents and cultures in the global South. This is an assured debut academic monograph from an author we hope to read more from in the coming years.
Ana Lucia Araujo, The Gift (Cambridge University Press).
Araujo’s monograph is a magisterial opus from a seasoned academic who has produced a trans-African study on the movement of ‘gifts’ from the giver to the receiver across continents, time and empires. It provides a detailed history of movement through different Africa, middle eastern and Western cultures of objects of value and is a good contribution providing a different lens and study of debates related to objects ownership and restitution in today’s academies both in the global North and South. This book is extensively researched with significant archival research and referencing. The calibre and level of scholarship this monograph presents and also the wide reach and breadth of Africa it covers is to be commended.
About the Prize
The ASAUK Best Book Prize is a biennial award for the author of an outstanding original scholarly work on Africa published during the two calendar years immediately preceding an ASAUK Conference.
Until 2023, the prize was titled the ASAUK Fage and Oliver Prize, in honor of John Donnelly Fage (1921–2002) and Roland Oliver (1923–2014), who were foundational pioneers of British African Studies and co-founders of The Journal of African History.
The committee for the 2026 prize consisted of Hazel Gray (University of Edinburgh), Iain Jackson (University of Liverpool), Taibat Lawanson (University of Liverpool), and Abisoye Eleshin (University of Lagos), and was chaired by Ola Uduku (University of Liverpool).