This article explores the enduring impact of efforts by the French mandate administration and Spiritan missionaries to regulate intimate partnerships in French Cameroon between 1916 and 1956. Drawing primarily on French archival material, I show how administrators and missionaries sought to domesticate ‘modernity’ through activities targeting women’s status and roles within intimate partnerships. Spiritans promoted monogamous Christian marriage by advocating for Christian legal status and through ‘schools for fiancées’ called sixas, which often provoked violent confrontations. Despite decrying these activities as culturally disruptive, the administration passed significant marriage legislation. While these efforts are characterized as exercises of epistemic violence because of their attempted erasure of women’s and broader local perspectives, I nevertheless highlight their ambiguity. Moreover, garnering insights from history, anthropology, critical legal studies, postcolonial and feminist theory, I argue that remnants of these attempts to reshape intimacy endure as ‘imperial debris’, contributing to the impasse in reforming the Cameroonian Family Code. Further research unearthing local historical perspectives and experiences of intimate partnerships can facilitate more egalitarian family law in Cameroon.

The impact of neoliberalism on the world university system has been widely debated. Trends in the global North today show not only the tighter managerialism that comes with cuts to university funding and commercialization, but also competition for fee-paying ‘student customers’ and casualization of academic staff in an era of increased international student mobility. There are louder calls for quality enhancement and more inclusive learning environments regulated and indexed by global rankings. In the global South and in Africa in particular, the same factors also drive institutional and infrastructural decadence amidst other postcolonial factors that have brought wider confrontation between the state and university staff and student bodies, which constitute the subject of this discussion.

This article explores the trajectories and narratives of people who have exited marginalized urban spaces in Nairobi to move through other social spaces in the city, or abroad. Claiming to belong to the ‘ghetto’, an idiom that refers to both a local space of exclusion and a globalized cultural and political imaginary, our interlocutors embrace the contradictions of this belonging in their everyday experiences. The careers they have built in different fields (art, activism, sport, academia) identify them as figures of social success and make them question their relationships with those around them. Defining their aspirations as intimately linked with the ghetto, but perceiving it as a strong constraint, they are not cutting ties with the place they come from. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork that pays attention to both their self-narratives and their writing, we propose the notion of ‘small boundaries’ to describe how social and spatial mobility from the ghetto produces, for each individual in a different way, an intimate cleavage within the self. We then propose to unpack this specific self as a configuration of three types of distancing (social, spatial and self-distancing) that allow both their aspirations and their obligations to coexist in everyday life.

This article analyses a competitive payment practice common aboard artisanal fishing boats in Sierra Leone. The competition for payment between crew members on board fishing boats complicates common discursive claims about generalized mistrust in post-war Sierra Leone. Through a phenomenological ethnography of working relations at sea, I show how competitive practices generate flexible trust between crew members. Competing in what is known as handfailure produces moments where others’ intentions and moral character become legible, allowing fishermen to forge and revise trust in light of shifting evaluations of trustworthiness. The trust forged through handfailure differs from older patron–client relationships between boat owners and fishermen, and from the interpretations of social breakdown in fishing communities given by government officials. The article contributes to recent anthropological conversations about mis/trust by showing how, in contexts where people question trust or claim that mistrust is widespread, trust can nevertheless be forged anew on more flexible and negotiable terms.

This article considers the intimate, the violent and the psychopathological in Bukavu, an eastern Congolese border city known for rape and war. A phenomenological focus pries open tensions in this ruinous, neoliberal ‘boom town’, frictions related to mental health, patterns of resort, and derangement. Ethnographic portraits from co-produced fieldnotes reveal family and street dynamics and a few adaptive, public figures of madness. Bukavu knows unhinged, delirious, psychotic people and PTSD infrastructures in this ‘trauma zone’. Patterns of psychosis go with ‘vivacity’, a Foucauldian word. The non-scientific term madness points to politics and the everyday, with many mad persons roaming the streets with performances. Intimacy enables rethinking this city, where ways of telling and knowing madness speak to agitation, kinship, strangeness and ordinary matters of sleep, dress and faecal matter.

Once considered an underclass, Gurage people have emerged as Ethiopia’s quintessential entrepreneurial class over the last seven decades. Studies on entrepreneurialism often focus on factors contributing to entrepreneurial success, such as ethnicity. The Gurage case study rethinks entrepreneurialism as nation making, demonstrating how Gurage entrepreneurialism was essential to the formation of Ethiopia’s modern economy and nation state in the twentieth century. The success of Gurage entrepreneurialism partly depended on support from the Ethiopian imperial state. The principal argument developed here is that Gurage entrepreneurs’ struggle against the ‘expatriate’ domination of Ethiopia’s capitalist commerce came to be constituted as a struggle for national economic independence, which was central to the nation-making project in this post-liberation period. In the process, Gurage transformed their own previous marginalization and denigration as ‘foreigners’ to become quintessential Ethiopian nation builders. It is a story about Gurage entrepreneurialism’s input into the Ethiopian nation-building project, one that contributes to larger theoretical discussions about entrepreneurialism, nation making, the state–market nexus and threats of foreign dominance in African markets.

In his latest article, ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe argues convincingly that public universities in Africa are in crisis, and that this crisis reflects the failure of postcolonial states to build the societies promised by anti-colonial liberation. He is certainly correct that the political economy of higher education (HE) in postcolonial Africa is a much-neglected topic, and his article is even more welcome for that reason. As a scholar with an extensive career in Nigerian public universities, Arowosegbe has also undertaken research fellowships in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa and the USA. Now he finds himself at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has experienced much from within and reflected deeply from afar on the state of universities in Nigeria and across the continent. His article is a serious work of reflection and scholarship, crafted and refined over years of engagement. Therefore, his serious charges on the state of the universities in Africa cannot be dismissed lightly.

Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe’s essay ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’ sheds significant light on political and economic influences, freedom within academia, and the role of these institutions within wider socio-political contexts. I want to endorse some of his proposals and make additional suggestions to comprehend the complexities and potential directions of African universities.

All archives have silences, which may come to resonate, even if they may never speak. What is unsaid or unsayable may be understood and appreciated even if never enunciated and never heard. The photographs of the Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele from 1960 to 1980 were taken against a background of violence: the uprising of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), which started before Cameroonian independence and continued for the next decade. The fight against UPC ‘terrorists’ by the Cameroonian state and the French military was marked by violence on all sides. There is no evidence of this in the Toussele archive, which consists of administrative ID portraits and recreational shots depicting friends and family and various displays of intimacy. The Toussele photographic archive shows young people in Mbouda exhibiting the global tropes of modernity. Soon after independence in Ouest Cameroon, both the violence and the promises of 1960s modernity were challenges to traditional sociality. A local reading makes it clear that the violence was ever present in its absence and denial: to perform an event was no small achievement and, like the birth of a child, was to be celebrated and marked by photography. Intimacy was achieved against a background of violence and celebrated for this very reason.

The October 2016 train accident on Cameroon’s main railway line remains shrouded in mystery. The announcement of the derailment before it happened, followed by a denial by the Minister of Transport a few hours later, at the very moment of the accident, has given rise to much speculation. According to testimonies collected in Eséka through fieldwork and the media, this tragic event was interpreted as the result of a witchcraft conspiracy. The inhabitants of the Bassa region, who consider the railway crossing their territory as a cultural heritage, had expressed their discontent with attempts to rationalize the line for some time. These accounts reveal that the disaster was triggered by collective action which unfolded through three distinct phases: labelling, whereby words acquire particular power; harbingers of misfortune; and finally, the bewitchment of the train to ‘zombify’ it, leading to its derailment. In response to these witchcraft imaginaries, the president himself addressed the Bassa’s grievances and requested an adjustment of the train stops, thus demonstrating the performativity of witchcraft and its capacity to put grievances on the agenda and to shape public policies. This article puts forward the idea that witchcraft represents a repertoire from which a community draws to express dissent. Bewitching and zombifying the train to make it derail are, for some actors, a way of signalling to the modern African state that it is not always ‘master in its own house’, that it does not have total control over reality and that it must constantly negotiate its authority.

Arowosegbe’s (2023) treatise on the crisis of higher education across the African continent raises many issues about the failures of Africa’s postcolonial states and the situations of the continent’s public universities. His courage in bringing to the fore the predicaments of Africa’s public universities is commendable. Two issues in particular attract my attention. First, while he underscores the strained relations between the state and the academy and recognizes the existence of some divergent ideological underpinnings therein, his account neglects the impacts of ideological contradictions on society’s political stability and socio-economic development. Second, his account omits the quandaries of private universities in Africa, an aspect of higher education across the continent that should not be overlooked if one is to holistically appreciate the predicaments of Africa’s universities within the context of the role of the postcolonial state.

This study is concerned with addressing discrimination in public spaces and interrogates the extent to which the social identity function of a local lingua franca impacted inclusion politics in leadership selections for public institutions in Africa. Guided by social identity and ethnolinguistic identity theories, selecting Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria as a case study, and using the qualitative research technique, this study found a three-level ethno-religious discriminatory categorization – Core Northerners, Peripheral Northerners and Non-Northerners – accommodated within the institution’s power hierarchy. Fluency in Hausa, the local lingua franca in Northern Nigeria, was the common factor. Although the language was not a requirement for appointment, it turned out to be the marker of social identity that positively impacted inclusion politics. With extensive linguistic acculturation, African nation states are better off investing in the propagation of the local lingua franca to address negative discrimination in public spaces.