## The decolonization of concepts  
The decolonization of the concepts, paradigms and categorizations used in social and human sciences, particularly in history, is regarded as an epistemological necessity throughout the scientific and intellectual communities in the former colonies and beyond (Mudimbe, 1988; Said, 1979) and as yet another component of the cultural and political emancipation of peoples who, not without difficulty, have thrown off the yoke of European colonization (Mignolo, 2011). Thanks to post-colonial studies, researchers in Latin America, Asia and Africa now select topics on the structural, protean remnants of colonial relations in the post-colonial era - a sort of 'coloniality' - that perpetuates age-old images and epistemological racism, disparaging non-Western cultural output. This inextinguishably burning issue somewhat informs the endogenous African approach taken in writing the General History of Africa. The approach to the decolonization of knowledge on Africa, providing an opportunity to write an innovative history from within and with a different outlook on the world, makes a crucial contribution to what the poet and thinker Aimé Césaire called the 'meeting place for giving and taking', a rearranged universal, a 'pluriversal', illustrating the great variety of human nature.  
The current project, initially known as Volume IX of the General History of Africa, is consequently different from all the previous ones. It now comprises  
three volumes - IX, X and XI - each with an editorial team consisting of section coordinators, co-editors and editors, with three main goals: (1) to update the General History of Africa and theories on human origins and the earliest human civilizations; (2) to explore and flesh out the formation process of 'Global Africa' and its consolidation in the rest of the world through its diasporas; and (3) to look at the opportunities and new challenges of 'Global Africa' in the contemporary world.