African women are frequently portrayed as a subaltern group in need of external support, used as property in forging social relations, producing wealth in people and doing most of the agricultural work to feed household members in societies where ‘modernization’ does not always seem to change their unfortunate predicament. This article destabilizes such narratives by showing the complexities of marriage practices and the difficult dialectics between freedom and subjugation in one West African agrarian society – the Brasa-speaking people of Guinea-Bissau. Among this patrilineal and virilocal group, marriage was usually arranged at birth or when girls were still small children. However, after marriage, women enjoyed great freedom of movement to have distant sexual partners and to pursue private profit-making activities. Paradoxically, while at present most young women are allowed to marry a young husband of their choice, having lost the support of their descent groups they are becoming more subjected to their husbands’ power and control.

Ngazidja Island in the Comoros archipelago (in the south-western region of the Indian Ocean) is an example of a matrilineal and matrilocal Muslim society. This article addresses the various ways in which the Ngazidja people negotiate gender and family relations by referring to matrilineal or Islamic norms and values, and the influence of Islamic reforms and Western norms. Matriliny is linked to a local political organization based on an age system and a male political assembly. This link explains the specific way in which matrilineal and Islamic ideologies are linked. Marriage is ruled by Islamic law, but alliances between matrilineal descent groups follow other rationales. The existence of two matrimonial regimes illustrates this distinction. The conceptions of fatherhood produced in Ngazidja shed light on the key issue of male authority in matrilineal and Muslim contexts.

This article explores the ways in which families are reproduced in Botswana's time of AIDS. It argues that conjugal relationships are transformed into kin relationships through a gradual process of recognition in which they become visible, spoken about and known to ever wider spheres of kin. For women, this process is often catalysed by pregnancy; for men, by marriage negotiations – and for both, recognition is key to self-making. However, every shift in recognition is risky and tenuous, even reversible, and marked by dikgang – ‘issues’, conflicts or crises – the negotiation of which is crucial to its kin- and self-making capacity. Tswana kinship and personhood, in other words, are constituted in crisis, making them both highly fraught and highly resilient. In this context, HIV becomes one of many risks entailed in intimacy and kin-making – suggesting one explanation for persistently high rates of HIV infection in Botswana, and indicating an unexpected capacity in families to absorb crises such as the AIDS epidemic.

Markets in Lagos, as in other parts of Yorubaland, are discursively constructed as spaces where women are in charge, perhaps based on their numbers. However, this article on the spatial relationships between women traders, the state and market institutions at Oke Arin in Lagos points to women's subordination and reflects Doreen Massey's concept of gendered spaces. Massey explains that spaces are in themselves gendered and that they also reflect and affect how gender is constructed and enforced in a specific context. The study is based on a sample of eighty Lagos (Yoruba) women traders and uses a combination of surveys, in-depth interviews, observation and secondary data to examine gendered strategies for survival and accumulation. I argue that, contrary to the perceptions of powerful Lagos market women, Massey's ‘internal structures of domination and subordination’ are evident in spatial governance, ownership and access at Oke Arin. Therefore, in response to spatial politics and the dominating structures of market and government authorities, women traders devise strategies of resistance, sometimes pushing the boundaries of legality to secure their livelihoods.

By discussing details of the current policy emphasis on entrepreneurship and microfinance, this article explores the dynamic and inconclusive negotiation of state authority in Kolfe Keraniyo, peri-urban Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In the last few years, Ethiopia embarked on a strategy of rapid transformation driven by what its political elite defined as a ‘developmental state’, which entailed the significant rescaling of the peri-urban space. The promotion of micro and small enterprises is an important aspect of the territorialization of state power in the peri-urban space, and is actively negotiated, challenged and refashioned. The first part of the article presents three central aspects of such projects: the policy of regularization and legalization; the notion of ‘group first’ or collective participation in the country's development; and the emphasis on ‘saving first’ to create micro-dynamics of capital accumulation. The second part of the article discusses how the beneficiaries of entrepreneurship initiatives mediate the normative framework provided by the developmental state, and highlights how that framework is neither inclusive nor particularly distinct in its effects from neoliberal development strategies. The article concludes that the making and unmaking of state authority is not unidirectional from above but operates through the redefinition of spatial and temporal boundaries from below.

This article deals with the Belgian colonial authorities’ obsession with classification and categorization, and explores how this obsession affected medical care in the city of Coquilhatville. Whereas the authorities aspired to medical care that was strictly segregated along ‘racial’ lines, providing separate hospitals for Europeans and Africans, in reality such rigorous segregation was unsustainable. I argue that it was the authorities’ inclination to categorize patients that eventually blurred the lines. Indeed, this article shows how the administrators became thoroughly enmeshed in their taxonomic zeal when members of the African upper class, the so-called évolués, demanded different treatment from other Congolese, to reflect their status. Furthermore, these upper-class patients insisted on being differentiated among themselves too. Responding to more and more claims to be discerned from yet another ‘lower’ évolué, and in an attempt to translate social space into physical space and thus provide the applicant with a more sophisticated hospital room, the authorities gradually ran out of options. As a consequence, they – albeit unwillingly – opened the doors to évolués of a hospital that was initially reserved exclusively for Europeans.

Excessive alcohol consumption often appears as an issue of great concern for the friends and family members of drinkers in Uganda, where per capita consumption rates among drinkers are among the highest in the world. In many cases, these families seek care for their loved ones in small shops run by herbalists, in the shrines of spirit mediums, in the pews of churches, or in one of several newly established inpatient rehabilitation centres. Yet, acts of intervention come not only from living family members or friends, but also from an array of spiritual beings who may arrive uninvited and outside intentional therapeutic contexts. In this article, we consider a case in which a mother's spirit intervenes in the life of her son, first by possessing his body and then by continuing to dwell there in ways that make it impossible for him to drink. This case highlights the importance of forces experienced as non-self in life-transforming processes, and demands that we give attention to a moment in a person's life when the work of care is achieved through an act of physical force.

During ethnographic fieldwork among lay Catholics in eastern Uganda, informants occasionally turned to deception in their dealings with God and the Holy Spirit; in doing so, they appeared to reject the Christian notion of divine omnipotence and omniscience. Based on ethnography conducted in a sub-county I call Buluya, this article tries to explain how such attempts are deemed possible and plausible. My argument is made up of two main strands. First, I argue that, in an indeterminate social landscape in which no one can ever fully ‘know’ (ngeo) another person, many interpersonal relationships in Buluya are firmly grounded in practical efforts to gain better jobs, more money, education and greater security. I show how deception is a normal and morally neutral aspect of these relationships, as each party strives to protect what they have, and to improve their prospects. Second, I draw on ethnographic and historical data to suggest that the Holy Spirit has entered into the local cosmology in Buluya as a powerful yet limited being, dependent to some extent on the guidance of its human mediators. Finally, I bring these two strands together to suggest that, when the Holy Spirit is conceived of as a limited being (it, too, does not fully know people), relationships with it that take place through a human mediator can also be legitimately characterized by deception, without risking the work of the Holy Spirit.

This article discusses youth cultural production in contemporary Africa, analysing the videos of Douala, which are often called ‘films that don't seem Cameroonian’. Most contemporary African videos dramatize everyday life, telling didactic stories that are very close to ordinary people's experiences. As such, they have been interpreted as forms of African popular art. Films that don't seem Cameroonian, however, break with this dominant trend. Directors and actors openly quote international hits and are more interested in transcending the local context than in dramatizing (and moralizing) it. Inserting this production into Douala society, this article deals with the youths’ desire to escape their everyday situations and connect with the global arena. It also considers the failures of this ambition, as their poor finances and infrastructural challenges bind them to a much more restricted horizon of possibilities. Video filmmaking in Cameroon is both a source of empowerment and prestige and a sign of marginality and powerlessness. The article concludes with an account of the cultural work at the core of videos that are syncretic and urban, but only partially ascribable to other experiences of African popular art.