Before the West Worked by Oladotun Reju
Dr. Oladotun Reju wrote Before the West Worked to explore Africa’s ancient and enduring wisdom of work—and to ask what we have forgotten, what was disrupted, and what can still be recovered. For the author, this is more than a book about the past. It is an invitation to rethink work, dignity, and development, and to recover parts of the African story that have been obscured. A better-told African story is one of the tools we need to better understand our possibilities and construct the future we want.
Before The West Worked posits that before the transatlantic slave trade, before colonial occupation, and before the imposition of a Western sacred-secular theology, Africa possessed a rich, sophisticated, and spiritually grounded work culture. Labour was communal in its nature, sacred in its meaning, and deeply connected to land, identity, and the image of God in every human being. That culture was deliberately dismantled. This book honestly traces that dismantling and proposes a constructive framework for its recovery. Drawing on pre-colonial African economic history, biblical theology, and Ubuntu philosophy, Dr Dotun Reju argues that the continent's development challenges cannot be addressed without first recovering what was lost.
The book is written for post-secondary readers and graduate scholars alike and is also an invitation to every African worker to reclaim and retell their story, calling, and dignity. It makes a bold assertion: Africa's crisis is not a crisis of capacity but a crisis of narrative, one that requires both deconstruction and reconstruction.
Before the West Worked is now published and available internationally on Amazon. For readers in Nigeria, there is a local pre-order option available through Patris.