This article introduces a personalized account of the early years of radio in Ghana based on an unpublished manuscript by one of its pioneering broadcasters – Bernard Senedzi (B. S.) Gadzekpo. An accomplished writer who produced manuscripts in both English and the Eʋe language, Gadzekpo's radio memoir is written from the vantage point of someone who worked in both the colonial and postcolonial broadcast

The excerpts below are from two of the sixteen chapters in B. S. Gadzekpo's radio memoir. In ‘Battles at the microphone’, Gadzekpo describes the diverse ways in which he and other Vernacular Announcers made their mark on wartime programming during World War Two, including how they carefully selected what could be aired as news and rallied local support for the war effort. The chapter ‘The music talent

This article examines the history of voluntary death on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. Its focus is the suicide of a young woman named Adwoa Amissa (or Adumissa), who took her own life in dramatic fashion in the town of Cape Coast in the early nineteenth century. Adumissa killed herself in response to the earlier suicide of a thwarted suitor, who declared his own self-destruction to be ‘on her

Demonization is a widespread aspect of political discourse. We are familiar with the demonization of Brussels bureaucrats as a tool for pursuing the British exit from the European Union, and we take stories about the compulsory straightening of bananas with a pinch of salt, however frustrating it might be that some disaffected voters choose to accept these canards as true. But somehow, stories about

This article explores the movement of children between households in Zambia as a site of ‘moral navigation’. Moral navigation extends Henrik Vigh's concept of social navigation from contexts of conflict and migration to more socially stable contexts in which well-being depends critically on people's ability to manage relationships. The live, dynamic and mobile character of these relationships means

The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango–Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller national parks (Mudumu, Nkasa Rupara and Bwabwata). While

This article explores the everyday lives that African migrants in Durban, South Africa share with other residents of the city. In conversation with Obvious Katsaura's work on ‘ethno-mutualism’, we use the example of ordinary greeting practices to show how Durban's urban everyday has been hijacked by xenophobic sensibilities. By demonstrating how the act of excluding migrants from these practices threatens

Those who populate the productive frontiers of capitalism are often targets of violence by groups and institutions aiming to poach, control and regulate their economic practices. This article draws on years of ethnographic research conducted with informal transport operators in Nairobi who drive, conduct and own the minibus taxis called matatu. In order to navigate the city, this workforce engages

This article examines the temporalities and terrains of the home-grown hustle economy of Mathare, one of the oldest and largest informal settlements in Nairobi. It builds on my previous work mobilizing the notion of ‘hustle’ to ground the narratives of struggle, opportunity and place-making expressed by youth whose livelihood strategies have centred around neighbourhood-based informal waste labour

Hustling as a concept has travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban settings. The widespread rearticulation of the term ‘hustling’ in a broad range of urban languages reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this

Young people from the low-income settlements in Kenya's third-largest city, Kisumu, struggling with unemployment refer to their efforts to generate a livelihood as ‘hustling’. At the same time, many of them put art (dance, music, poetry) at the centre of their lives. This article attempts to account for the significant popularity of the arts among Kisumu's youth. It understands the ‘way of the artist’

This article explores the question of what happens when highly socialized and contingent forms of provisioning go wrong, and young men are forced to start again in unfamiliar urban contexts. The decline of George Mirembe's moneylending business in Kampala pre-empted his departure from the country and his arrival in Nairobi in search of new socio-economic opportunities. Lacking the documents and language

Kenya's refugee camps have evoked spectacular imaginaries of terrorism and humanitarian crisis. Drawing on everyday discourses and shared knowledges among camp administrators, this article reveals that these geopolitical narratives are underwritten locally by more generalized concerns about the imagined ‘otherness’ and moral degeneracy of the displaced. Refugees are thus portrayed as criminals and

Cameroonians recently invented a new word to characterize the state of their country: anusocratie (the rule of the anus). This became central in the moral panic from 2000 onwards over a supposed proliferation of homosexuality. Anusocratie links such same-sex practices to illicit enrichment by the national elites and their involvement with secret associations of Western provenance, such as Freemasonry

Islamic charms and amulets (lāyā) are simultaneously fairly common, highly valued and ardently contested items among Muslims in Asante. Tracing their history and the relations in which Muslims in Asante manufacture, make sense of and debate them, this article places such amulets within relations and delineates the discourses surrounding them. For those who manufacture and request them, these amulets

This article analyses how concerns about youth and violence intersect with the politics of managing religious coexistence in the coastal Kenyan town of Malindi. During extensive ethnographic research, I noticed that Muslim, Christian and ‘Traditionalist’ leaders, politicians and NGO officials often fear that the ‘idleness’ of young people leaves them susceptible to various immoralities, including political

This article explores the austere labour regime of Safaricom – Kenya's largest telecommunications firm and financial services provider – from the perspective of the women and men who work as ‘human ATMs’ for Safaricom's breakout service, M-Pesa. Far from women and men simply acting as ATMs, I argue that the affective and social labour of these people working at sites across the country constitutes

This article reflects on how scholars have engaged with the past and with notions of authority in the African Great Lakes. A dominant ‘presentist’ perspective on the region mobilizes historical knowledge in an uncritical fashion, reducing authority to a set of historical clichés and building on a familiar focus on crises and the state. Bridging history and political science, we propose two concepts

This article argues that the politics of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the 1920s reshaped relations between ethnicity and territorial sovereignty in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands. A 1925 criminal trial involving Gadabursi Somalis began as what Britons deemed a ‘tribal matter’ to be settled through customary means, but became a struggle for Ethiopia's regent, Ras Tafari, to assert Ethiopia's territorial

In Sierra Leone, transactional relationships – so-called agreement relationships – have a life-course dimension. Not only are they employed by young people but they are equally important among elders, and they serve different purposes as people age. Long-term ethnographic research with the elderly uncovers that they remember the past and engage with the present through agreement relationships. The

Twenty years after the Mozambican war ended, a return to arms from 2013 by the opposition movement Renamo served to revitalize support for the party in the 2014 election, and put pressure on the Frelimo government to consider demands for constitutional change. Building on existing research on post-war politics and on recent economic change, this article addresses the question of how Renamo obtained

The attention paid to the security threats hanging over Burkina Faso, while legitimate, has overshadowed the underlying transformations in Islamic associational life since the fall of President Blaise Compaore in October 2014. This major political upheaval had a significant impact on the participation of Muslims in socio-political debates, the relations between generations and, more widely, the bases

What are the experiences of the African middle classes, and what do their experiences tell us about social change on the continent? While there have been ample attempts to demarcate the parameters of this social group, the necessary work of tracing the social life and social relations of the middle classes is just beginning. The articles in this special issue provide compelling accounts of the ways

As a precondition of belonging, professionalism is often a taken-for-granted feature of being middle-class. Yet ethnographic attention to experiences of work reveals that professional identity can be fragile. Drawing on ethnographic research among nurses in KwaZulu-Natal, this article traces the feelings of precarity about work and the ambivalence that pervades ideas of professionalism. This ambiguity

Like many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a

As one of the primary personal sites of financial investment, expression and public performance, housing has stood at the centre of contemporary studies of class in Africa. This article adds to the existing literature on housing and class by exploring residents’ desires for formal housing in post-conflict Luanda, Angola. Luanda’s residents increasingly believed that access to formal housing, not necessarily

The colonial-era Senegalese Muslim intellectual Shaykh Musa Kamara is best known for his over 1,700-page Arabic-language text about the history and social organization of the greater Western Sahel, Zuhūr al-basātīn fī tārīkh al-Sawādīn (Flowers in the Gardens in the History of the Blacks). Long celebrated by nationalist historiography as proof of an autochthonous historical consciousness and a spirit

The concept of ‘middle class’ in African societies has been recognized recently but at the same time it resists clear-cut definition. Rather than seeking clearer classification, I propose to embrace its contested nature as productive, seeing ‘middle class’ not as a category that we can find ‘out there’ and measure, but as a classification-in-the-making. Middle-class status, or a particular idea of

This article describes how residents and staff of an eldercare and Alzheimer's home in a small South African town joke with each other. Residents are mostly white and staff mostly black, but there are exceptions, and both groups are multilingual. Jokes between the two groups in the home are racialized, if not sometimes racist, in light of historical and contemporary post-apartheid socio-political and

This article discusses the workings of civil society and its leaders in Niger. Tracing the country's historically sedimented socio-political order, it argues that Niger's civil society is characterized by a twofold embeddedness. Since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, the political game in Niger has been exemplified by co-optation, bribery and corruption. These spoils are a central focus

A wealth of new writing has emerged around the future of labour, focusing on thinking beyond employment in imagining the futures of ‘surplus populations’ no longer needed by labour markets. These new imaginaries include radically expanded forms of redistribution, such as unconditional cash transfers or universal basic income. But what are the views of the ‘surplus populations’ themselves? This article

Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture and rural village economies. Rural communities, while small in scale, are creating new ways to transform their degraded environment. Their small size allows them to develop location-specific strategies to manage and improve water, soil and agriculture. This article focuses on two Sufi communities ( daaras

Eṣu of the Yoruba tradition, the custodian of the primordial aṣẹ , embodies the principle of perspicacity and pragmatism that is crucial for the exercise of responsibility by sentient and thinking beings. As such, Eṣu demands the ultimate in consciousness as a basis for just living and for a just measure of reward or sanction. Eṣu calls for painstaking commitment to rigorously distilled information

The history of South Africa's urban-based ‘struggle lawyers’ – a trajectory epitomized by Nelson Mandela – is much discussed by historians and biographers, reflecting a broader vein of historiography that celebrates anti-colonial legal activism. However, it was South Africa's ‘Native Reserves’ and Bantustans that produced the majority of African lawyers for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, two-thirds

In the trading centre of Atine Atirir in eastern Uganda, young men gather to play ludo. They are educated but most do not have salaried employment. Many farm and do some form of casual labour. They talk about the importance of leisure and 'leisure time' and discuss the prospects of Arsenal in the English Premier League. In this article I explore the relationship between education, farming and 'leisure

By the end of the 1990s, molecular approaches predominated in biomedical science, but, for West African scientists, biology could not have ‘gone molecular’ at a worse time. Resource constraints led to knowledge expiry and many discovery dreams were terminated, exported or at least postponed. Pivotal transitions in methodologies, knowledge and resources temporally overlapped with an emergent imperative

This article traces a shift in how hospital workers at a Tanzanian public hospital thought about their workplace. In 2010, for the first time, staff began collectively imagining what they called ‘a real hospital’. This collective dreaming of institutional possibilities emerged due to two transformations: a shift in Tanzanian government policies enabling government institutions to initiate their own

This article examines responses to the terrorist attack on the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi in September 2013 in order to investigate the role played by blood donation, as an expression of national dreams, in the political imaginary of contemporary Kenya. It considers the symbolic effectiveness of calls for blood donation made by political figures in the aftermath of the attacks. Such calls

The ‘Africanization’ of science after decolonization was replete with dreams. Claims to Africa's place in the high-modern world, expectations of national technological and economic progress, and individual dreams of scientific discovery, professional development and fulfilled careers drove scientific work and lives. The term Africanization, coined by the colonizers, reproduced colonial notions of race

Africa’s growing cities and towns are drawing more global and local attention, with urbanization increasingly impinging upon existing balances of power, disrupting economic dynamics and intensifying public policy challenges such as inequality, air pollution and high fatalities from crashes and congestion. These trends are occurring amidst growing anxiety about climate change, with cities facing increased

Recent infrastructural developments in Senegal have severely impacted on the livelihoods of female bana-banas from Mali, a group of mobile traders operating in the Mali–Dakar corridor: transportation costs have significantly increased, travelling has become a more exhausting experience, and fatal accidents have become more frequent during journeys. Why did the bana-banas continue these arduous journeys

The articles that appear in this part issue focus on disparate topics, from rumours of electoral fraud to the production of art, and span the African continent from Guinea and Ghana in the west to Zimbabwe in the south. Despite their evident differences, the contributors see their pieces as united by a common theme: emergence. Elaborating on Simone's influential exploration of the intertwined concepts

Abstract:This article is an ethnographic investigation of the labours of making art and selling liquid petroleum gas (LPG) in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. It locates these activities within a shared social world, centred on one of Bulawayo’s major art galleries, and it demonstrates that artists and LPG dealers use similar strategies to respond to the political conditions of life in the city. This article frames

Abstract:This article is about two generations of women in south-western Chad – the baou déné and the mosso. It addresses the puzzle of how these groups of women are present in the everyday life of the region known as ‘useful’ Chad, while women as economic agents are absent from stories about the region and about successive schemes to make it profitable. The baou déné are wealthy farmers, but the last

Abstract:This article examines conspiracy theory as an integral part of political practice. In 2010, following a tumultuous year that included a military takeover and a junta-led massacre of civilians, the Republic of Guinea held what was widely considered to be the country’s first democratic presidential election since independence in 1958. During this time, many Guineans regularly exchanged information

Abstract:What drives the formation of ties and networks in ethnically hybrid spaces despite the occurrence of conflict? We approach this question by examining the actors involved, the institutions affected, and the economic and environmental contexts surrounding such tendencies. This study explores socially thick arrangements between Maasai and Kikuyu in Narok and their role in the non-violent use

Abstract:A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over newly independent Uganda’s sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala’s multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability

Abstract:Fire outbreaks are common sources of anxiety and insecurity in informal settlements, but they can also provide new opportunities for claim making and governance of urban space. This article examines how a series of four fires in Accra, Ghana – three of which took place in its largest squatter settlement – offered new opportunities to experiment with governance, or a new way for residents and

This article investigates the fraught relationship between violence and healing in Central African history. Looking at the case study of one of the largest uprisings in the colonial history of Congo – the Lobutu–Masisi Kitawalist uprising of 1944 – the article asks how the theories of power that animated the uprising might help better illuminate the nature and role of violence not only in the uprising

either a siyasa or a tarbiyya orientation. The concepts of the modern and of the nation state, which are at work in Vaughan’s book, also play a key role here, but with different implications. The modern is an object of criticism, a source of inspiration, and an arena in which diverse opportunities – some of which are threatening to previous reformers – unceasingly emerge. The nation state, in contrast

give the book heft and texture without making it clunky. One of the few criticisms that can be levelled against Thurston’s book is its focus on intra-elite dynamics. While there may be nuanced theological debates at the elite level, raids on Boko Haram camps frequently describe finding charms and amulets among the belongings of the foot soldiers that would be considered unIslamic bid’aa (innovation)

I am grateful that Jonathon Repinecz took the time to review our book. I respond here only to the implication that it plagiarizes the work of other authors. Put so starkly, this may not have been the reviewer’s intention, but it reads that way. Repinecz starts with Ousmane Sembène’s rebuke, addressed to Jean Rouch in 1965, of studying Africans as he might insects. Is it placed prominently to imply

Abstract:The coming of the mobile phone camera has transformed photography. This article explores this transformation through a case study of photography in Eastleigh, a Nairobi estate that is home to many thousand Somalis, both Kenyan Somalis and refugees from Somalia. It is a trade hub for East Africa, a social and economic hub for the global Somali diaspora, and a place regarded as suspect in a

Abstract:The formalization of 'informal' customary land rights is at the core of current rural land policies in Africa. The dubious impacts of such policies on agricultural production, and the recomposition of land rights and governance they cause, have been studied widely. But their territorial dimensions are hardly acknowledged. Studying the implementation of a rural land rights formalization project

to Otta, forcing women to renegotiate their positions as traders and ritual experts, at which they had excelled in the absence of their husbands. During the colonial period, then, women increasingly enacted their influence on social and political life in general, including the role of masquerades, through their positions as wives and daughters of the male custodians of these societies. This, Willis

Drawn from East, West, Central and Southern Africa, the case studies in this special issue build on several decades of important work on photography in Africa. That work has examined colonial photography and postcards, studio work from colonial times to the present, activist photography, photojournalism, and artists who work with photographic images. It has addressed issues of representation, portraiture

Abstract:The last decade has witnessed the ubiquitous presence of camera devices, from conventional cameras to communication gadgets (such as mobile phones, iPads and tablets), built with the capacity to produce, edit, disseminate and interact through photographs. In this article, I analyse visual materials circulated on Facebook, YouTube and Nairaland (a locally popular social-networking website used

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 brought the concept of political Islam to the attention of theWest. Ever since then, social scientists have struggled to define political Islam, and, more recently, the Islamic State. Were these new concepts, postcolonial legacies that suddenly emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a challenge to liberal democratic order? Or were Muslims simply speaking on the international

In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological

Abstract:Congolese commerçantes, or transnational women traders, travel abroad to cities such as Guangzhou in search of affordable products to import to Kinshasa. Without any support from local banks, women must search for the means to finance their trips and navigate a complex bureaucracy governed by unpredictable customs tariffs. Just as men rely on their social networks to ensure the success of