<p>While strategy studies on African higher education are increasing, studies providing a comprehensive understanding from a strategy-making perspective are insufficient. Hence, this study aims to review the existing strategy studies on modern African higher education to provide a comprehensive understanding of the strategy-making perspective and to drive future research directions by presenting a research agenda. We employed the PESTLE framework to guide our analysis and develop a comprehensive perspective on strategy-making perspective contributions. Existing studies on modern African higher education are highly concentrated in South African, with an increasing number of publications in the last five years. Our findings show a significant research interest in the political and socio-cultural aspects of modern African higher education, highlighting neoliberal economic policy under globalization and internationalization, governance, decolonization, diversity factors, and leadership in African higher education institutions (HEIs). Studies on the economic and technological aspects of African higher education are also emerging as a potential area of research. Finally, we discuss a number of implications to support managers, policy decision-makers, and strategy practitioners in effective strategy-making for modern African HEIs.</p>