The applied linguistics community has recently multiplied actions (e.g., Habibie & Hultgren, 2022a; Mackey et al., 2022) to foster gate-opening and collaborative peer review practices in academic publications. However, some Western editors and peer reviewers continue to exclude Francophone West African authors’ research, raising ethical concerns. Therefore, this study, framed in Ubuntu-Maaya values, examines the publishing experiences of three West Africans in Western journals. Participants participated in three focus group sessions, during which we discussed their relationships with Western editors and peer reviewers. I developed two themes and two subthemes after conducting a reflexive thematic analysis. The first theme, reviewing means to become authors’ jatigi to co-construct knowledge in dignity, describes how the peer reviewers’ compassion, hospitality, and respect foster long-term collegial relationships, whether the editorial decision is favorable or not, which enables participants to recover confidence. The second theme, reject my manuscript without rejecting my knowledge: This is humiliating, exemplifies how participants may often perceive some editors’ and peer reviewers’ practices as undermining their confidence and positioning as researchers. I discuss how the conceptualization of review practices in Western tradition, which is sometimes unidirectional and top-down, may differ from and be perceived as unethical within the Ubuntu-Maaya epistemic frame, which emphasizes the relational aspect and the dignity of all stakeholders.