Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African-American Muslims have travelled or relocated to the rural yet renowned city of Medina Baye, Senegal. They were invited there by Shaykh Hassan Cisse, a Senegalese Islamic scholar and leader in the Tijani tariqa (Sufi order). This article focuses on the experiences of African-American and fellow diaspora Black Muslims living and learning with African Muslims in the Tijani hub of Medina Baye. It interrogates the assumptions, expectations and misunderstandings that characterize relationships between the two groups. I argue that, as members of the Tijani tariqa, diaspora Black disciples become integrated within the local system of collective care modelled by African disciples. Complicating analyses of African–diasporic exchanges that tend to differentiate and hierarchize the interconnected economic hardships facing diaspora Black and continental African communities, I argue that the relationship between these groups illustrates the role of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse’s branch of the Tijani tariqa as a counterhegemonic social movement offering new paradigms of social and economic reciprocity that enable Black Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic to mitigate the contemporary impacts of racial capitalism and global apartheid.

In this article, I consider how migration practices around the Black Atlantic and discourses of repatriation mobilize Black African diasporic Muslim identities in present-day Senegal and in a mosque in South Carolina that is situated on land that was formerly a slave plantation. I use the term ‘reversion’ as a vocabulary of ‘diasporic becoming’ to signal how notions of Islamic piety are coupled with a politics of Black Atlantic Muslimness in the context of a West African Sufi tariqa – or ‘Black Atlantic Sufism’. Moreover, I consider how identity formation and African Muslim ancestry are impacted by discourses of geographic return and repatriation that are linked to spiritual tourism.

This article analyses the racial framing of the humanitarian encounter between Turkish and African Muslims as a trope of first contact. Intensifying humanitarian relations with Africa south of the Sahara, in tandem with the foreign policy of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), has led to the emergence of a racialized affective regime in Turkey that endows Islamic philanthropy with new racial meanings. This article argues that racial subjects such as the White Muslim and the Black Muslim are produced through the affective labour of humanitarian volunteers and others, who narrativize and circulate experiences of first contact in Turkey. Based on a multi-sited ethnography in Turkey, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia and Benin, this article explores race-making as affective labour. Taking on Berg and Ramos-Zayas’s call for an anthropological theorization of race and affect, it develops a critical framework to examine how humanitarian voluntarism produces differently racialized subjects. In order to do so, this analysis draws on James Baldwin’s insights into the racial and affective politics of the first contact to discuss how Turkish humanitarians build on and alter the racialized affective regime Baldwin describes.

Muslim aid organizations are relatively new actors in the Western aid industry. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with the UK-based NGO Islamic Relief, I explore the organization’s engagement with a school in need of repair in southern rural Mali that is also the site of a sacred shrine of importance to locals. I examine the contextual global logics of racialization that undergird different interpretations and practices of what it means to ‘do good’. Situating an understanding of ‘development’ in an analysis of global racial capitalism, I argue that, as an Islamically inspired aid organization based in the UK, Islamic Relief is both subject to anti-Muslim racism and complicit in a white-adjacent racialized project of ‘development’ in Africa. I foreground the whiteness of development to show how modernist development practice makes it impossible to see other ways of conceptualizing ‘doing good’ that are also deeply grounded in Islam.

This article provides the first systematic exploration of the ideas on inequality of the two Ghanaian women’s rights advocates Annie Jiagge and Florence Dolphyne, who were both part of the Ghanaian National Council on Women and Development during the 1970s and 1980s. Zooming in on their work and writings during this time, I challenge the view offered by some scholars that these decades were ‘apolitical’ and shaped by ‘quiet activism’ with regard to the Ghanaian women’s front. I show how Jiagge and Dolphyne actively rearticulated womanhood in postcolonial Ghanaian and African societies, placing women’s ‘issues’ and rights within the framework of an unequal world order. In doing so, I argue that they vernacularized the contemporary global discourse on women’s rights, shaped by the UN Decade for Women (1976–85), in a Ghanaian context, evoking what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has called an in-between ‘third space’ through which the many intersecting and ambivalent aspects affecting the lives of women in postcolonial Africa, and the so-called Third World at large, could be articulated.

Drawing on research conducted in southern Benin since 2000, this article explores the entanglements between grief, social status and funerals, and accounts for the conditions and the motives of the massive and multifarious investments – inextricably psychic, social and economic – in funerals that can be witnessed locally. I argue that, far from being mere ‘conspicuous consumption’, funeral expenses should be understood as the product of a number of intersecting dynamics, as the lavishness of these events cannot conceal the burden they represent and the anxieties they feed. In fact, filial duties and politics of reputation often entwine to give an existential dimension to these occasions, reinforcing one another to lead social subjects to engage important economic means and to bury their dead ‘at all costs’. In fact, as internalized norms and social pressures finally convince most mourners to organize obsequies beyond their means, the psychic and social tensions of funerals regularly constitute the all too common hidden face of the more commonly reported lavishness.