If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been too much of engaged or public anthropology and too little of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit animated by rigorous contemplation and practice on and around a set of shared curiosities. Distinguishing between academic anthropology and engaged or public anthropology requires a priori reflection on the scientific status of anthropology. This paper argues that anthropology’s scientific potential has yet to be fully realised. Without a rigorous commitment to science, theory building, and an acknowledgement of associated epistemologies, as well as little patience for knowledge production as a collaborative endeavour, much anthropology today is little different from an evangelical and ideological commitment to saving souls, saving situations, winning converts and ‘giving back’. The paper challenges anthropologists to commit to the essential task of producing critical knowledge of critical value, and to re-embrace and fulfil anthropology’s core mission and ambition as an evidence-based field science. The need for anthropology as a rigorous and collaborative field science, liberated from ‘western’ and ‘male’ dominance, calls for a negotiated, inclusive and accountable ethics, evidence-based thick description, an understanding of interconnections and interdependencies, and critical and comparative theory building as a permanent engagement and as a dynamic and constructive debate