In a context of globalization and liberalization, Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialization of its space. Various large-scale actors, including international private investors, investor states, and local entrepreneurs, are constantly seeking to expand their land holdings for the production of food crops or biofuels. This article presents two Rwandan case studies and analyzes how large-scale land acquisition by foreign and local elite players affects local livelihoods. It identifies broader agrarian and social changes taking place in Rwanda and Africa and provides suggestions as to how the tables might be turned in order to protect local livelihoods in the further evolution of Rwanda’s agriculture.

Based on a classroom encounter of the author, this article explores the gendered nature of African university space. It discusses a 2007–8 policy that banned pregnant adult students from living in the student residence halls at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. The policy was implemented despite protests from the university’s students and staff. The article argues that the more visibly reproductive a student’s body became, the more alien it was considered to be in spaces of knowledge production. This alienation was incongruous at a university widely considered as the most politically progressive in South Africa. It was rooted, however, in Western-oriented traditions of masculinist knowledge production in which there is no space for the female, let alone the pregnant, body in intellectual spaces; and in South African traditions of marginalization, exclusion, and “passing” in public space. Exploring ideas of “body language” and “bodies of knowledge,” the article concludes that there is a need for an interdisciplinary politics and epistemology of “seepage” in higher educational institutions that recognizes women’s minds and their bodies.

The Sokoto caliphate in nineteenth-century northern Nigeria was an astonishing episode in the history of Africa: a huge, prosperous polity that created unity where none had existed before. Yet today its history is underexplored, sometimes ignored or even disparaged, both within Nigeria and in Europe and the U.S. Yet that history is extraordinary. Sokoto town was, and still is, an anomaly within Hausaland; built speedily on a “green-field” site as both a trading and a political center for the caliphate, it is a site of pilgrimage that to this day remains a rural town with no monumental buildings or fine edifices. As a by-product of a religious movement (jihad), Sokoto thus represents many of the dilemmas that faced and still face radically reforming Islamic groups if they expand rapidly and go to war. Thus Sokoto history remains deeply significant for modern Nigeria.

Over the past two decades, attention in the social sciences increasingly has been drawn to the problem of violent civil conflicts, a problem that has disproportionately affected Africa more than any other region. Two approaches to this problem have come to dominate the field: attempts to understand the root causes of civil conflict and attempts to understand the dynamics of its violence. Critics of the former approach have elaborated the ways in which the etiological agenda itself makes, and then politically mobilizes, the reality it claims to find. The goal of this article is to elaborate a similar critique for the latter agenda by examining the productive and destructive interaction between theoretical assumptions and empirical realities that have informed attempts to understand the Algerian massacres of the late 1990s. The overall intention is not to promote a new understanding of those atrocities. Rather, it is to gain a deeper insight into the processes by which episodes of mass civil violence become objects of scientific analysis—and thus objects for political utilization—despite their having emerged from an empirical milieu of contested, ambiguous, and indeterminate realities.

The connections between democracy and sexuality—that is, between civil liberties and the protection of nonconforming sexualities—are rarely discussed in Africa. On the contrary, nonconforming sexualities have been instrumentalized to entrench dictatorships and to weaken democracy. As was the case in early twentieth-century Europe and North America, homophobia has become a political tool used by conservative politicians to promote self-serving agendas. Heterosexuality is also idealized by an acute ahistoricization of African politics by the Western media and civil society. The problem is also compounded by the distortion of African history promulgated by the dictatorial leadership on the continent.

In China, Tanzania, and Zambia, state officials participate in an ongoing articulation of official memory of the TAZARA railway project of the 1970s. In high-level diplomatic relations, the TAZARA project and its construction workers are continually held up as a foundational legacy for China–African development cooperation and friendship. However, the now-retired workers who built the railway tell very different kinds of stories about their experiences. In the context of recent economic liberalization policies, retired TAZARA workers draw on individual and collective memories of railway building to achieve both recognition and material security in a world in which they feel forgotten. They seek resolution of their grievances in old age through the telling and retelling of narratives of their youth. By doing so, they claim their own right to remember in the face of ongoing official efforts to reinvent heroic pasts.

This article analyzes the value chain for Chinese manufactured goods such as garments and textiles sold in sub-Saharan Africa. It explores the opportunities for Africans with small, private businesses in the export trade from China, the potential for long-term business development, and how strategies of engagement have changed over time. It finds that the value chains for low-cost goods vary. There is great diversity of entry levels and opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, and traders evolve diverse strategies to obtain and defend their position in the chain. These findings are discussed in terms of understandings of international value chains, the informal economy, and African economic development strategies.

This article examines the shifting representations of and discourses produced about Chinese salesmen and their collaborators in the small West African nation of Togo. It suggests that in this context representations of China’s so-called New Scramble for Africa are troublesome, namely because they tend to silence the role of Togolese women traders as producers and as central historical and economic subjects in the making of a postcolonial commodity chain for printed African textiles. In so doing the article questions standard economic theories of global market forces, debunks stereotypes regarding the Chinese advance in West African markets, and challenges assumptions about the vulnerability of African societies.

Although Africa has gained a reputation as one of the world’s most homophobic areas, there are cross-national differences in the extent and intensity of antigay laws. This article assesses the factors that have been advanced in the literature —albeit unsystematically and often mostly implicitly—to explain the observed patterns of homophobia: conservative religious beliefs, delayed political and economic development and resistance to globalization, political leadership strategies, and the legacy of colonialism. It argues that a more robust analysis suggests that a British colonial past, a large Muslim population, and the absence of economic freedom and openness explain at least one-third of the variance in sodomy laws. This finding has implications for efforts to fight African homophobia.

In the last two decades we have witnessed an increase in online petitions and campaigns emerging from Europe and North America against homophobia in various African countries, creating a particular form of visibility with some remarkable global success. Based on these online petitions and postings as well as the responses of African activists, this article reflects on the politics of this global queer solidarity. By suggesting a restrategizing of antihomophobia politics, it contributes to the ongoing debate about LGBTI politics in a transnational and global framework, pointing to the challenges but also the possibilities for the future.

This article examines the impact of Chinese textile imports on the organization and politics of women’s textile trading networks in Benin. The incursion of cheap Chinese textiles into markets formerly dominated by imported European fabrics has shifted the balance of power between networks of traders in Benin’s textile market, reconfiguring relations between textile traders, state officials, and international companies. Focusing on political and economic dimensions of trading networks, the article reveals how global linkages transform local economic networks and how local actors structure networks for global economic partners. Far from bypassing state actors, this process is shown to incorporate state officials from above and from below, splintering established trading networks and weaving new ones from emerging configurations of traders, state officials, and global textile exporters.

The city of Guangzhou, China, hosts a diverse and growing population of foreign Christians. The religious needs of investors and professionals have been accommodated through government approval of a nondenominational church for foreigners. By contrast, African Pentecostal churches operate out of anonymous buildings under informal and fragile agreements with law-enforcement officers. The marginality of the churches is mirrored by the daily lives of the church-goers: Many are undocumented immigrants who restrain their movements to avoid police interception. In contrast to these experiences, the churches present alternative geographies where the migrants take center stage. First, Africans are given responsibility for evangelizing the Gospel, as Europeans are seen to have abandoned their mission. Second, China is presented as a pivotal battlefield for Christianity. And finally, Guangzhou is heralded for its potential to deliver divine promises of prosperity. This geographical imagery assigns meaning to the migration experience, but also reinforces ethnic isolation. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews, participant observation, and video recordings of sermons in a Pentecostal church in Guangzhou with a predominately Nigerian congregation.

Since the discovery of the Jubilee oil field in the Gulf of Guinea in 2007, Ghana has emerged as an oil-rich nation and emerging exporter of high-quality crude oil. Simultaneously the energy supplies available to Ghanaian citizens in everyday life have become increasingly unreliable, marked by persistent rolling blackouts. This article seeks to understand the complex relationship that has developed between Ghana and China, to illuminate Ghanaian perspectives on their energy needs, and to investigate how energy has become entangled in national politics and bilateral relations between Ghana and China.

Over the last decade, the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach has gained prominence as a tool of “inclusive” capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa. This approach reframes development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as “micro-entrepreneurs.” Yet while transnational capital has set its sights on Africa’s “underserved” yet potentially buoyant markets, BoP initiatives do more than seize upon the entrepreneurial talent and aspirations of Africa’s informal economies. This article argues, rather, that these initiatives create BoP economies through a set of market technologies, practices, and discourses that render the spaces and actors at the bottom of the pyramid knowable, calculable, and predictable to global business. The article describes how these technologies extend new forms of market governance over the informal poor, reconfiguring their habits, social practices, and economic strategies under the banner of poverty reduction.

The assertion “homosexuality is un-African” is widely viewed as an expression of homophobia. However, without knowledge of what homosexuality and “Africanness” mean in a given context, any understanding of how to shift the prejudices associated with this assertion remains limited. Research conducted in 2010 with police, high school learners (students), and a sample of more than one thousand residents from two urban townships in South Africa contributes to this understanding. This article draws on data from the research to explore the significance of cultural translation when considering what constitutes same-sex prejudice and how it may relate to notions of authenticity or “real Africanness.” While the research provides evidence of same-sex prejudice, there is also evidence of qualified acceptance of same-sex sexuality and of efforts to combat prejudice. Opportunities for change are discussed with reference to the data.

This article traces the history of homosexual and transgender behavior in Senegal from colonial times to the contemporary period in order to demonstrate the flimsiness of the claims, made by many political and religious leaders and scholars, that homosexuality is “un-African.” Such claims, which appear as reactions to neocolonialism and Western intervention in African affairs, usually are homophobic discourses that invoke patriotism, cultural difference, and morality in order to justify the subjugation of homosexual and gender nonconforming individuals (goor-jiggens) living in Senegal. In an attempt to understand the roots of Senegalese homophobia, the article analyzes several depictions of homosexuals and transgender people in contemporary Senegal and traces them to similar representations in European writings of the colonial period. As this approach reveals, homosexuals and transgender people in Senegal, from colonial times to the present, have been constructed as scapegoats, first of the French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) and then of Senegalese political and Islamic backlashes. Although they have always cohabited with the rest of the society, homosexuals and transgender people in Senegal have been treated largely as strangers in their own land. By analyzing the discourses of both French colonials and Senegalese, one finds a persistent binary opposing the West and Africa and denigrating sexual and gender variances and subcultures in Senegal as pathological European imports.

Increasing numbers of Chinese migrants have arrived in southern Africa over the past two decades. Perceptions of and reactions to the Chinese, however, vary from country to country and within countries. This article, based on several years of field and survey research, examines perceptions of Chinese in South Africa and Lesotho. The author argues that in addition to the global context, national political and economic realities, history, and memory shape local perceptions of China and the Chinese people who now reside in these spaces. States and other political actors play a key role in constructions of foreigners. Competition, whether real or perceived, is also important in shaping negative attitudes toward migrants. However, personal interactions and memories can serve as mitigating factors, even in the face of negative news of China or Chinese activities.