Notes On Power: An African Introduction to Understanding Power | 2026 Edition

Most textbooks teach you what to think.

This one teaches you how power works, so nobody can think for you ever again.

Notes On Power is a 289-page African-centred textbook that gives you one skill: power literacy.

The ability to look at any room, any institution, any relationship, and immediately see who holds the power, how they got it, and how it can be moved.

Not theory for theory's sake. A system. Five questions you apply to everything: Who decides? Who benefits? Who pays? Who is excluded? Who can challenge it?

Ask those questions consistently about your school, your government, your economy, your culture, and you will never be manipulated the same way twice.

Here's what's inside:

✅ 12 chapters. 6 parts. Zero filler. ✅ Self & Identity Power : understand who already has power over you, and why you let them ✅ Political & Institutional Power : how governments, constitutions, and institutions really operate ✅ Economic Power : who owns what, how that happened, and what it means for you ✅ Narrative & Cultural Power : who controls the story controls the people; learn to see it ✅ Ethics, Leadership & Strategy : the difference between leading and dominating ✅ Advanced Power Studies : African governance, political economy, gender, and intellectual production at university level

This is not a book about Africa. It is an African book. Built from African history. African thinkers. African case studies.

Steve Biko. Frantz Fanon. Kwame Nkrumah. Chinua Achebe. Mansa Musa. Thomas Sankara. The Soweto Uprising. Rhodes Must Fall.

Not borrowed frameworks retrofitted onto African experience. Original African thought, applied to the world, the way it should have always been taught.

The result?

Students who finish this book don't just pass exams. They walk into boardrooms, parliaments, newsrooms, and communities, and they see what everyone else is missing.

That is what power literacy does. And once you have it, nobody can take it from you.

Notes On Power. The Official Student Textbook of the NOP Academy. Founded by Tsepo Tebogo Matsimane.

◆ UNCHAINED. UNAFRAID. UNMISTAKABLE. ◆