The essays here underscore Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe"s continuing optimism about the possibilities of Africans constructing post-"Berlin-states" as the launch pad to transform the topography of the African renaissance. Readings from Reading is a timely publication, coming on the eve of the historic January 2011 referendum in south Sudan in which the people of the region will choose to vote to restore their national independence or get stuck hopelessly in the Sudan, the first of the "Berlin-states" that Africans tragically "inherited" in January 1956. Ekwe-Ekwe insists that the contemporary Africa state, imposed on Africans by a band of European conqueror states and currently run by what the author describes as a "shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent"s human and material resources", cannot serve African interests. The legacy, as this study demonstrates, has indeed been catastrophic: "The [African] overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of...