S. W. D. K. Gandah was the son of an influential chief and witnessed first-hand the way the conflicts, pressures and transformations of colonial rule played out on the ground in northern Ghana. Belonging to the first generation of educated northerners, he put his literary and intellectual attainments to original use throughout his life. In addition to an autobiography (The Silent Rebel), he wrote a fascinating history of his father (Gandah-yir), extracts from which are published here. In this introduction I discuss the author's development as a writer and local historian. I analyse his ambivalent perspective on Chief Gandah's life, as loyal son, but also critic of many aspects of village life – a perspective typical of a first generation of indigenous intellectuals who embodied both a traditional upbringing and new values instilled through Western education. I look at Kumbonoh's reflections on the task that he has set himself for his Gandah-yir manuscript, namely reconciling oral tradition, local memories, and written history in an attempt to produce a historical account not only for his immediate family and the wider Dagara community, but for a broader readership.

I did not set out purposely to write a history text book on my father but to put on paper what he himself narrated orally to his audience when the family gathered to have some pots of pito [sorghum beer, C. L.] to drink. But having started to put on paper his own narration about his life history, I felt it would be very useful to the family, both for those members […] who have grown up to know him personally and those who have not had the opportunity to know him well or at all before he passed away. For it would be selfish of me and of any of my literate brothers who knew him so well and had the opportunity to hear all his oral history not to pass this down in written form so that his children and grandchildren and future generations would be able to read and remember him with great adoration as I do today.

Despite the perception that department stores are a recent phenomenon in West Africa, modern indoor retail spaces have existed in its major cities since the mid-twentieth century. This article uses the history of Kingsway Department Store in Accra as a lens to understand emerging political, economic and social tensions in post-colonial Ghana. Drawing on United Africa Company (UAC) records, staff reports and inspection findings, as well as local newspapers, advertising and oral interviews, I demonstrate how legacies of colonial capitalism, struggles for political independence and negotiations over what constituted the ‘modern’ fuelled both local and foreign support of the project. For the UAC, investment was an opportunity to legitimize its activities in a newly independent Ghana and a means to shed its image as a colonial merchant firm. While local authorities were divided on whether large-scale retail developments should be part of an expanding post-colonial city, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah thought the store might provide a key component in constructing his vision of a new modern nation. However, the presence of white-collar working women, young managers supervising older employees, and the mixing of white expatriate and African shoppers exacerbated social conflicts – challenging local and colonial notions of authority based on race, gender and age.

This article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Mozambique, harness communication to express and address experiences of constrained physical and social mobility. It starts with an analysis of a highly valued form of oral communication – bater papo – that youth, especially young men, engage in on a daily basis before turning to mobile phone use. Tying these different forms of communication together is a profound desire to claim membership of, and to participate in, a world that remains elusive for most. However, if mobile phone communication builds on pre-existent forms of communication, it takes on particular aesthetic qualities that speak of, rather than resolve, exclusion. The article argues that, while helping bridge distances in significant ways, mobile phone communication nonetheless, and somewhat ironically, also betrays young men's immobility.

This case study probes the close link between locality and musical production. The setting is Opuwo, a small city in northern Namibia, notorious for its many bars. Here the music of a local band, Bullet ya Kaoko, provides the soundtrack to the quest for belonging and identity that takes place in the marginal space constituted by these bars and pubs. Bullet ya Kaoko performances are characterized by the simultaneous articulation of paradoxical images and different models of identification: they use keyboards and synthesizers to rework an old genre (omitandu, praise songs), fuse Kwaito moves with the elders' warrior dance, and weave Herero polyphony into a jive-like beat and structure. Lyrics, music and dance address the challenges of (post-)modern life and give voice to uncertainty and fragmentation. At the same time, they embed people in kinship and place, evoking a strong yet encrypted sense of belonging. The music of Bullet ya Kaoko is ironizing: it questions, but does not answer. It challenges both the old and the new, but refrains from solving the tensions created by their juxtaposition.

There is widespread apprehension about the resilience of the ‘traditional African’ model of the extended family in maintaining norms and practices of inter-group cooperation and care in conditions of demographic, social and economic change. In Nyanza Province, Kenya, where one of every five children is currently orphaned, and HIV/AIDS and wide-scale poverty continue to render lives and livelihoods insecure, many people are not able to take their families' care for granted. Ideas and practices of kinship have been challenged profoundly by questions regarding who is responsible for the care of orphaned children. This article looks at two complementary practices among Luo families in western Kenya that address such dilemmas: the communal initiative of ‘sitting’ as a family to discuss and resolve issues in a cooperative and consensual manner; and the individualistic initiative of ‘standing’ to represent the interests of another individual. I suggest that while the immediate purposes of sitting and standing are pragmatic in assigning caring responsibilities for specific children, their eventfulness also actualizes something greater: trust, reciprocity and solidarity among extended families.

Given the observed agro-pastoralization of livelihoods of both Moose ‘farmers’ and Fulbe ‘herdsmen’, interactions between both groups living in Burkina Faso's north-central region are usually interpreted in terms of vanishing symbiosis and increasing tension along ethnic lines. There is, however, a remainder to this equation, namely the cattle Moose entrust to Fulbe. This article looks into Fulbe involvement in solving Moose fecundity problems to elucidate the nature of the relationships in which cattle entrustment is embedded. It is argued that Moose ideas about the other world and its intervention in procreation and constituting personhood allow imagining an extension of Moose societal relations beyond conventional community boundaries, that is, including Fulbe. This extension can be subsequently – but not necessarily – effectuated through the establishment and performance of spiritual kinship in which cattle owned by Moose can be embedded. The divergent extent to which sustained Moose–Fulbe relations result is explained in terms of social controversy regarding agro-pastoralization of livelihoods accompanied by differential cattle accumulation.