Summary: The discussion provides a speculative reflection on the power of modern science, technology, innovation (STI) and knowledge systems for revealing some distinctive style of modernity in Africa. The focus is on uncovering the necessary mental or intellectual costumes required for the modernization of STI systems as the backbones of modernity through a ‘Strategy of Subversion and Rationalization’. This modernization process is essentially the passage from close, self-confirming, faith-based, conventional or customary knowledge systems to essentially evidence-based, scientifically-established and technically-proven knowledge systems. In these systems scientific knowledge is construed as a theory of the real and as a technology of truth and understood as the epistemological foundation of any vision of an idiosyncratic form of Afro-modernity. The scientific method purges Abrahamic and Shamanic worldviews of non-scientific constituents and opens a path from the pre-modern, totemic, enchanted, patriarchal and over-religious worldviews and mindsets to the more secular, rational, liberal, mechanical, enlightened and scientific worldviews and mindsets of modernity. This paradigmatic shift requires championing the tyranny of the scientific method and the rule of technique as well as promoting decisive scientific arbitrations, increased technical mediations and a redefinition of STI’s relationships with religious, cultural, social and economic life. The necessary capacities for achieving this shift toward more modern scientific and technical knowledge orders are grouped into eight areas (paper attached 15 pages).