The history of archival management in Uganda reveals the foundational relationship between austerity and colonial archival institutions. This article discusses how impoverishment and self-interested editing were central to the bureaucratization of colonial archives at their founding. Extreme austerity in the wake of structural adjustment in the 1980s accelerated archival decay while adding new uncertainties

This article explores the history of two Tanzanian publishing houses and the remarkable life and career of Walter Bgoya, former general manager of Tanzania Publishing House (1972–90) and managing director of Mkuki na Nyota, which he founded in 1991. Using the lens of microhistory, and drawing from extensive interviews with Bgoya and conversations with two colleagues and three authors, the article first

Chronic shortages of resources to run the state have been a feature of Mozambique since the colonial period. Even before the adoption of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the late 1980s, conditions were austere due to the effects of Portuguese colonialism, a decade of liberation struggle, prolonged civil war and policy mistakes following independence in 1975. Drawing from archival research

Under Idi Amin's government, institutions that served the public interest were dramatically under-resourced. An array of self-nominated, self-important, self-righteous people were empowered to take on administrative tasks that, in an earlier dispensation, had been the work of professionals. Businesses and institutions that had formerly been under the regulatory authority of credentialled experts were

Bayaaye is a Luganda word meaning ‘hooligans’ used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the

This is an ethnography of internet scams in Abidjan through which I attempt to develop a theory of digital sorcery. The brouteurs of Côte d'Ivoire impersonate Europeans in social media profiles and seduce others into falling in love with them. After months of flirtatious messaging and photo exchanges, disaster strikes their avatar and they ask for an emergency wire transfer from their digital lover

By the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at ‘the people’, its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the

This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities

In modern social thinking, norms are generally thought of in opposition to a space of freedom that is more or less curtailed by and through processes of normalization. ‘Transgression’ thereby becomes an implicit or explicit act of resistance against the norm. This is particularly clear in Western Queer Theory, where a political and analytical investment in anti-normativity has – paradoxically – become

This article examines She Called Me Woman, a 2018 anthology of and by twenty-five queer Nigerian women. The text focuses on a variety of narratives by women as a way to challenge the confinement of queer Nigeria to the narratives of gay men. The article demonstrates how the multifarious queer(ying) experiences of women in different geographical and social contexts within Nigeria help to further contextualize

Sutura (discretion, modesty) is a central element in Senegalese Wolof culture that, among other things, promotes feminine honour through chastity, silence with regard to discussing sexuality with elders, and refraining from articulating same-sex desires in general. Consequently, sutura is seen as limiting the space for non-normative sexualities. However, lesbiennes in Senegal strategically employ sutura

In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, herbal doctors argue that African bodies are infested by ‘dirt’. Gathering at crossroads, they teach about the dangerous effects of processed foods on African bodies. During public product demonstrations, they patch together urban gossip, kemikali (chemicals in Kiswahili) and consumer goods from abroad to demonstrate their overheating effects on stomachs. In this

This article examines the abandonment of an important food taboo – the prohibition of milk consumption by newly married women – in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Offering a detailed exploration of this hlonipha custom in three rural communities, I start from the position that food always reflects the entanglements of its material and symbolic attributes. By tracing health

Throughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority

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

This book addresses an important topic: how an underclass of poor young men makes ends meet in the ‘thin’ economies of urban Africa in times of rapid social and political change. The eloquently written book is based on extensive conversations with two young men, Ibrahim and Haile, and some of their friends and relatives. It documents their everyday lives, situated in Arada – an old and now dilapidated

In a workshop entitled ‘Harnessing the Hustle’, held at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in April 2017, a group of academic researchers and community activists came together to discuss a concept that resonated across ethnographic findings and everyday life alike: hustling. For many of us working in Nairobi for years, we considered the real ‘experts in the room’ to be our Kenyan interlocutors

reproduce marginality. The emphasis on resistance, defiance and protest, he argues, limits our capacity to understand resistance as something more ambiguous and limited, such as the everyday practice of maintaining self-worth and respect in the face of sustained marginality. It also perpetuates a conception of history as a series of events that happen to people rather than something people make within

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

analysis. This perspective allows her to identify less overt and more silenced forms of resistance, such as how the use of popular culture allowed Saharawi women to show solidarity against arranged marriages during Spanish colonialism or to speak out in Malabo’s Semu market today. Allan manages to link all these situations thanks to extensive use of documentation and fieldwork, and an intelligent use

Somalis have been travelling outside the Somali Peninsula since time immemorial, but the most outstanding exodus of their recent historical and contemporarymass migration – displacementwould be abetter term – occurred after the 1970s, when themobility and movement of the Somali diaspora to the Arab Peninsula, especially to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, attracted many Somalis. In comparison with

Indians, Pakistanis and Southeast Asians. Yet, Somali refugees struggle to survive in South Africa. Abdi concentrates less on the harsh conditions of the foreign countries where Somalis live, focusing instead on a range of positive experiences, such as the businesses they established in South Africa, the UAE and the USA. One would not find in these pages the horrors we occasionally see in the news

This book by Joanna Allan is a comparative study that analyses the resistance to the colonial and postcolonial regimes in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea from a gender perspective. Those familiar with the complicated political situation in these two former Spanish colonies in Africa, of which we are constantly reminded by the use of pseudonyms by the informants, will appreciate the courage of

rural life’ (p. 152). Indeed, Phillips highlights how these modes of engagement with democratic forms have a distinct temporality too: ‘As the food supply has its seasons in so much of rural Africa, so too does citizenship’ (p. 180). Also worth noting is how the ramifications of the political upheaval in Singida described by Phillips have continued beyond the period covered in the book. In 2017, after

Abstract Contemporary societies in Central Africa are known for their mourning ethos: communities often engage in endless lamentation upon the death of their loved ones. Yet people experience the death of a family member differently, depending on the deceased's sexual identification. While the death of a person identifying as heterosexual is generally felt as unbearable, that of a person identifying

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

Abstract In Burkina Faso, political turmoil, escalating insecurity and a looming pandemic challenge the population's trust in the state. This article contributes to the debates about state–citizen relationships in fragile countries by connecting local health-seeking practices with the global trends of datafication and a strong focus on the fight against malaria in this part of Africa. Drawing on long-term

Abstract 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

Abstract For many decades, anthropologists have debated the question of matriliny, with some expressing concerns about its prospects of survival in a modern economy of private property and greater economic differentiation. In continuing this debate, this article provides new and contemporary evidence of the continued relevance of matriliny as a kinship practice that shapes the daily conduct of women

Admittedly though the Gurensi and Boosi, and for that matter the Frafras, living in the Bolgatanga and Bongo District Council Area have flourished for nearly over five hundred (500) years, their history and traditions have for these centuries laid almost buried and forgotten. Their history has in fact been relatively neglected by comparison with the period of the Mamprusi, Gonja, and Dagomba histories

memoirs of a number of important protagonists – such as AbuBakr Gumi, the chief ideologue of Nigeria’s Izala movement. My one criticism of an otherwise excellent text is that the argument would have benefited from a clearer definition of the term ‘Salafi’. As Henri Lauzière’s work (TheMaking of Salafism: Islamic reform in the twentieth century), for instance, has shown, this term is now heavily overused

the colonizer. Their fall bears the mark of division and betrayal, while announcing the struggle to come, which will, this time, end in victory and open the path to independence. The final section opens on a stimulating discussion about the complementarity of literature and history to interrogate the elaboration of collective memory and identity in Africa through the example of the cultural hero. The

Robin Horton, one of the world’s finest intellectuals, one of anthropology’s most original, brilliant and influential scholars, and a most provocative philosopher of African indigenous modes of thought in the last fifty years, died on 28 November 2019. He was born an English man, trained at Oxford, lived and died a Kalabari (Niger Delta, Nigeria) gentleman, and was buried in Buguma on 18 January 2020

providing a sense of hope in the future, as war traumas can be retold through narratives of resilience and resistance. This overarching framework makes the collection a useful resource for students and scholars in multiple disciplines, including African studies, feminist security studies, peace and conflict studies, and women’s and gender studies. In presenting a collection of essays, written mostly

Abstract This article explores the innovative and hybrid intellectual project of Christopher Azaare Anabila. Since 1976, Azaare has been documenting the histories of the Gurensi and Boosi people of northern Ghana and has crafted genealogical maps of whole villages and clans. He has written manuscripts on taboos, totems, proverbs, missionary activities, cultural institutions and anti-colonial resistance

Abdul Raufu Mustapha, who died on 8 August 2017, was a Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford. He will be remembered as a sterling scholar and a committed comrade who devoted his life to leaving the world better than he found it. For Raufu, the purpose of life was the construction of a better society and he had a clear idea of what a better society meant – more equality, more opportunities

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

Abstract 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

gelled with the ANC’s calls for ‘people’s education’ and because a prospective black middle class had its children pencilled in to attend elite schools. Cole also asks whether, after democracy, whites have moved into historically black spaces, such as township shebeens. On the whole, the answer is no. Desegregation has been a one-way street. Black people with the means have moved out of spaces designated

place in the contemporary moment. Although there are societal rules that young people obey, there are many ways in which individuals break the rules – or rather bend them to suit their contemporary needs. There is a rearranging of what it means to be a woman, and of how to enjoy sexuality. This is not to say that gendered sexual power does not exist. Women have to worry about being seen as promiscuous

Abstract A generation of South Africa's new black middle class shuttles between the suburbs and the townships. This has become the focus of some South African humorous essayists, among them Ndumiso Ngcobo and Fred Khumalo, on whose works this article is based. The article argues that studying the new black middle class should extend to these literary sources and approaches. The humorous essays by these

times, however, ‘he would distance himself, especially when he knew that women were watching him and me to see how we acted as a couple’ (p. 45). But this decision to protect her own privacy seemed not to be reciprocal, given the nature of the research interest. Spronk also used part of her own background strategically: ‘At the appropriate moment I also let them know about my previous relationship

Abstract This article focuses on the impact of the policies of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government on Zimbabwe's black middle class. It does so by exploring three propositions emerging from the academic literature. The first is that during the early years of independence, the middle class transformed into a party-aligned bourgeoisie. The second is that

Abstract Batswana contrast owning cars with owning houses: the first signals self-centred accomplishment and possibly deceptive status claims, and the second an investment in sociality. The tensions between individual accomplishment and social connectivity are long-standing in Botswana, and a close examination of cars and houses finds that each is tied up with both dimensions of self-making. The new

Abstract 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 Compaoré 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

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

Abstract 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