How should we understand and explain social and political phenomena in Africa in the past and at the present moment? The dominant theoretical discourse framed by decolonization is barely useful if not completely useless when it comes to describing and explaining African phenomena. It privileges, in the most unhelpful way, colonialism in the history of the continent and obscures the path to illuminating contemporary situations there. This is primarily because it either does not recognize or fails to take seriously African agency, again, through its history. Once we take African agency seriously, we stop treating Africans at all levels as if they were permanent children whose wills are readily bent by their colonizers sixty years after independence and who may not have their choices scrutinized. Let us restore African agency to the centre of our analyses and pay attention to the complexities of the continent and its peoples.