The majority of young people in Africa are today living in “waithood,” a prolonged, difficult, and dynamic transition into adult life. This experience is shared with an increasing number of young people in the developed North who are also grappling with issues of joblessness and political exclusion. This waithood generation is increasingly losing faith in the ability of its leaders to address young people’s needs and expectations, and it is rebelling against the status quo. From the youth uprisings that led to the Arab Spring and the ousting of Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal and Campaore in Burkina Faso, to political protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and Los Indignados in Spain, young people have been at the forefront of political change. However, they have not yet been able to effect systemic change. While profound social transformation takes time, this generation is still wrestling with how to move beyond street protest and have a lasting impact on politics and governance.

For Okiek in Kenya, marriage arrangement is a nexus where transformations of personhood and social relations, changes in land tenure, and shifting state engagements come together in ways that shape individual and family lives as well as communities. This article sketches transformations in Okiek life and marriage arrangement and considers how Okiek have managed interlineage discussions central to marriage arrangement. It explores the social dynamics, evocative rhetorics, uncertainties, and moral imaginations through which people constitute lineages and affinal relations in changing circumstances, and situates these processes within a longer historical trajectory of socioeconomic and demographic change.

Throughout his career, Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo has been searching for cinema; not African cinema, just Cinema. In order to explain properly this claim, the essay will first consider Bekolo’s work within the context of the ever-ongoing conversation regarding the framing and aesthetics of African and Third Cinemas. Second, for a closer perspective on what will be termed “neurotic cinema,” the essay will key on Bekolo’s latest effort, Naked Reality (2016), a purposely unfinished work that echoes absurdist theater, mimics frantic contemporary thought, and proposes that cinema should not yield finalized products because that may go against its very nature.

The West African savannah is an area where old and new institutions fill the lacunae that limited statehood has left. Some of them claim a long history, others have emerged recently as a reaction to military and civil crises. The performance of power, its display and presentation, is a theme that all these associations share. They do so on different occasions and by different means, which highlights their diverging ethics and attitudes towards their local communities and the state. This introduction to the guest edited forum outlines central themes of these performances and discusses performativity in West African power associations.

This article looks at the characteristic shirts of the donso, or initiated Mande hunters. Often described in the literature as visual displays of the wearer’s power, in the context of contemporary Burkina Faso these shirts are instead an example of how hunters deal with representations of power through an aesthetics of concealment (Ferme 2001). An excess of display is conversely connected with the politics of state-recognized hunters’ associations. Issues of ecological change, local conceptions of power, and contemporary struggles with state authority intersect in the practices and discourses on hunters’ shirts.

Secrecy and its performative display have been privileged perspectives in the study of poro and similar power associations in West Africa. I develop an alternative understanding of the Senufo poro as an institution that fosters and sustains bodily experience, establishing an all-embracing sensory regime for members as well as non-members in their villages. Participation in nighttime funerary rites creates the image of an invisible social body, and shared bodily experience informs collective intentionality towards the social. Serving as a stable nodal point in everyday discourse, this function contributes to the recent revitalization of poro associations in Côte d’Ivoire’s post-conflict society.

The hunting songs of the majority-Muslim, Odienné region of Northwestern Côte d’Ivoire accomplish more than meets the ear. They conjoin and distinguish Muslim goals and ostensibly non-Muslim hunting practices. The musical repertoire of my host, Dramane Coulibaly, is illustrative. This study examines the role that Dramane’s songs played in motivating initiated dozo hunters to kill game during dozo funerals, a primary concern for dozos at these events. Next, it analyzes the structure and content of Dramane’s songs in relation to the embodied, emplaced, and material dimensions of dozo funerals, where Dramane’s performances served to calm the spirits of the dead so that they would leave the living in peace. Finally, it examines the musical aspects of Dramane’s songs in relation to Islam, with the aim of broadening the study of Islam in West Africa and beyond to encompass the texts and performance practices of dozo funerals.

This article analyzes the relationship between Mande hunters (dozos) and the Ivorian state in the prefecture of Ouangolodougou in northern Côte d’Ivoire. Having adopted a prominent security role during the violent conflict of 2002–2011, dozos have made continuing efforts to maintain their position in the post-conflict state. To negotiate their position, they draw on a performative repertoire, such as the display of powerful attributes in the context of processions. Although they have had to concede some more strategic and profitable activities to the reestablished state, dozo chiefs effectively govern the rural northern borderlands of Côte d’Ivoire.

This article is about self-defense movements in Burkina Faso, with an emphasis on the interplay of political pragmatics and cultural representation in public debate. It examines how two different self-defense movements—the dozos and the koglweogos—articulate tradition and politics with respect to locally organized self-defense in present-day Burkina Faso. In addition to a description of these movements, this comparative study of self-defense movements adds the important dimension of political rivalry and antagonism between the movements under study. First, it demonstrates how the state has tried to contain self-defense movements. Second, the emergence of koglweogos is analyzed with respect to public debate, as well as the state’s attempts to contain the movement bureaucratically. Third, it describes how dozos and koglweogos seek to assert public authority in “the new Burkina Faso” that has taken shape since the fall of Blaise Compaoré in October, 2014. More specifically, this article is devoted to the conflictual relationship between the dozos and the koglweogos that was publicly enacted in late 2016 and early 2017. Self-defense movements must not only be locally and traditionally legitimate, but they also need to be responsible actors in the national political space. Hence, “performing tradition, while doing politics” simultaneously represents the political containment and the cultural legitimacy of the self-defense movements.