In June 2019, Google announced plans to connect Africa to Europe through an undersea internet cable project named Equiano. As a techno-commercial platform, Google’s gesture warrants scrutiny and propels this essay’s analyses of the political connections of Internet spaces that also enable a visual turn in the scholarship of African history. Using the Google search engine and Facebook, Yékú and Ojebode stress the embeddedness of digital technologies in cultural meanings that include visual narratives that visibilize government’s ahistoricism. They conclude by foregrounding the digital labors of Nigerian digital subjects who deploy historical photographs on Facebook as expressions of performative nostalgia.

In all Akan polities, ancestral Black Stools, which belong to the matriclan, are the source of political power and legitimize kingship. Due to the sacred and exclusive nature of stool rituals, Ampene argues that it is the performing arts which define and enhance the power of rulers in the public domain. This ethnographic narrative of the 2014 Grand Worship provides a rare opportunity for the performing arts to project the power and responsibility of the Asantehene when he participates in musical performances and dances.

Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.

The historical autonomy of the religious community of Medina Gounass in Senegal represents an alternative geographic territory to that of colonial and postcolonial states. The borderland location of Medina Gounass allowed the town to detach itself from colonial and independent Senegal, creating parallel governmental structures and imposing a particular interpretation of Islamic law. While in certain facets this autonomy was limited, the community was able to distance itself through immigration, cross-border religious ties, and smuggling. Glovsky’s analysis of the history of Medina Gounass offers a case study for the multiplicity of geographical and territorial entities in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

In 2012, three male elders in Tanzania filed a lawsuit against the government and a foreign investor for trespassing, justifying the case as rightful resistance to land grabbing. Based on ethnographic research, however, Chung argues that their action is more appropriately understood as gendered lawfare; the plaintiffs drew on their multiple positions of privilege to exclude a diverse array of legitimate resource users, including their wives. Their lawfare was not only perverse in its design, but also in its effects. It increased the uncertainties surrounding the rights and status of local people and reinforced intersecting inequalities within the “local” itself.

As evidenced by the widespread controversy surrounding an otherwise small-scale mining investment pending in Casamance, Senegal, uncertainty shapes the extension of the extractive frontier. Fent argues that amid this uncertainty, different actors are able to politicize or depoliticize extractive investments through the work of scaling. Opponents cast the project as part of larger-scale, longer-term extraction, linking it with regional narratives. By contrast, state and corporate actors depoliticized the mine by emphasizing its limited extent and downscaling conflict to the local level. This demonstrates the conflictual processes through which extractive frontiers are realized—and resisted—through both space and time.

From 2011 onward, a European agribusiness progressively purchased about 38,000 hectares of land in Zambia. Although operations have commenced on the ground, only part of the land has been developed. Salverda and Nkonde look at the reasons for and implications of this partial development, focusing particularly on how, in such a context, Zambia’s slow-moving land administration, lack of financing, and the presence of rural residents on the purchased land have become self-reinforcing challenges. Their aim is to provide insights about why (very large) land deals often fail to achieve their projected capacity, leaving both investors and local residents in limbo.

Farmland investments have attracted numerous entrepreneurs and companies to Africa in the past two decades. However, acquiring, retaining, and exploiting large-scale landholdings is more complicated than it seems. Investors need to persuade governments and populations of their anticipated benefits and limit dissenting voices when they emerge. Focusing on a contested land project in Senegal, Gagné develops the concept of “repertoires of control” to analyze the different performances of power that companies deploy to assert and legitimize their land claims. She argues that to survive, companies must continually adapt these performances to changes in the political environment of their host countries.

Democracy is one of the most contested words in the English language. In Africa, these complexities are compounded by the question of whether democracy is a colonial imposition. Cheeseman and Sishuwa provide a historiography of debates around democracy, track how these narratives have developed over time, and argue that there is widespread public support for a form of what they call “consensual democracy.” This is not to say that democracy is universally loved, but despite the controversy it remains one of the most compelling ideals in political life, even in countries in which it is has yet to be realized.