In a comparative perspective, literacy has been closely associated with techniques of the self and with the emergence of modern subjectivities. But what happens when literacy is developed without genres such as diary keeping being widespread? Scrutinizing grassroots practices, this article demonstrates that even people who are not confronted with established forms of self-writing engage with literacy in ways that bear an imprint of their lives and subjectivities. Drawing on an ethnographic study in one village in southern Mali, it sets a socio-historical background where writing practices arise primarily as responses to the pressure of rural management. Yet the local discourses on the value of writing are suffused with notions of privacy. The article focuses on the unstable but shared practice of keeping a notebook for farming as well personal notations. Through a detailed analysis of two notebooks, it advocates for a set of distinctions between the individual, the private and the self that helps disentangle the issue of writing and self. This leads to a contrasted view of the local engagements with literacy. The question of the crystallization of notebook keeping as a genre remains open.

This article investigates practices of speech and sociability in open radio debates in Kampala to decipher imaginaries of citizenship in contemporary Uganda. In these ebimeeza (‘round tables’ in Luganda, also called ‘people's parliaments’) orators are engaged in practices of social distinction when compared to those they call the ‘common men’. These spaces of discussion reflect the importance of education in local representations of legitimacy and morality, whether in Buganda ‘neotraditional’ mobilizations or Museveni's modernist vision of politics. The ebimeeza and the government ban imposed on them in 2009 reveal the entrenchment of the vision of a ‘bifurcated’ public sphere, the separation of a sphere of ‘development’ and a sphere of ‘politics’, the latter being only accessible to educated ‘enlightened’ individuals – despite the revolutionary discourse and the institutionalization of the Movementist ‘grassroots democracy’ model in 1986.

Most development interventions targeting rural women's economic empowerment measure success through returns from women's on-farm or off-farm activities and the income they generate. This article suggests that special emphasis needs to be laid on income control, not just its generation, in order to take account of the more or less subtle socio-cultural obstacles and other structures of constraint hindering women in this regard. The article draws from ethnographic case studies conducted for a doctoral dissertation project in south-west Burkina Faso to show how women in cotton-farming zones strategize to circumvent customary rules and control their on-farm incomes. The context is an organic cotton-farming project targeting women. I argue that understanding these constraints and strategies provides policy makers and development practitioners with tools for a better grasp of the social landscape – and that this, in turn, enables them to reach empowerment goals.

Focusing on Gbekebor, a small rural community in Burutu Local Government Area in Delta State, this article examines the rise of small-scale artisanal oil refineries in the oil-rich Niger Delta area in south-eastern Nigeria. Mostly owned and run by unemployed youth in the Delta region, this informal underground oil economy is a classic example of the ways in which the mass of disgruntled youth in Nigeria have now evolved their own new survival strategies in the face of inauspicious social and economic conditions in everyday life. In the article, therefore, I argue that the growth of illegal refineries in the Niger Delta region represents ordinary people's desperate search for economic and social justice for themselves and their communities when the state and superordinate economic regimes (oil corporations) operating in the Delta area have connived to deny ordinary people their social and economic rights as citizens.

This article examines the genealogies of the Ìlàjẹ and the narrative of belonging that reinforces claims to ownership of land and natural resources such as oil. The article maps how oil flow stations, pipelines and platforms have come to represent an ancestral promise of wealth to many members of Ìlàjẹ communities. This claim making is embedded in a mythic origin that continuously reinforces a distinct identity that projects an imagined community connected to the Yorùbá of south-west Nigeria as well as the oil-rich Niger Delta region. While many scholars have studied the myth of origin of the Yorùbá, in most cases focusing on rituals and political imagination that intersect with linguistic evidence in determining Yorùbá identity, these scholars have often neglected the centrality of these myths to oil resources. Thus, I investigate how the Ìlàjẹ narrative of belonging creates its own specificity of ‘ownership’ of natural resources through ritual performances connected to migration and dispersal of subject populations. I examine how such narratives create spaces of opportunity for the organization of protests against multinational oil corporations and the Nigerian state.

Recent economic and socio-political dynamics in the territories that form Equatorial Guinea are related, in different ways, to the extraction of hydrocarbons from its Exclusive Economic Zone since the mid-1990s. These transformations are strongly mediated by specific social groups, especially the family that has held power since 1968 and transnational oil companies, whose relationships are central to the exclusive political configuration in the country. The article analyses this particular form of extraversion of power as part of a broader history of the region, in which the role of the state's sovereignty as articulated during decolonization is shown to be instrumental in the allocation of rights and the political economy of oil today. The article also discusses the spaces that the new political economy of oil has opened for alternative transnational connections around the country.