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.

Why is African Studies in North America dominated by white scholars? In this reflection piece, the 2018 president of the African Studies Association revisits the organization’s sixty-year history, exposing the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies at the organization’s founding in 1957 and then secured first by the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa and second by the “recolonization American-style” of knowledge production on the continent in the postcolonial era.

This article examines the continued salience of sung protests in South Africa by investigating the adaptation of anti-apartheid freedom songs along with the emergence of new expressive forms in ongoing community mobilizations. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic research in Johannesburg, this article argues that freedom songs constitute a distinct register that is politically efficacious due to singing’s aesthetically embodied effects. Formative elements of antiphony, repetition, and rhythm constitute a musical practice that organizes protest gatherings, allows for democratic leadership, and fosters collective participation. These practices yield a plasticity in the songs that makes them adaptable to changing political circumstances.

Contestations over indigene rights and political representation resulted in Christian-Muslim riots in the Nigerian city of Jos where, between 2001 and 2010, over 5,000 people were killed. This study complements existing literature on the spatial dimension of violence by focusing on how Jos’s neighborhoods were transformed from everyday residential areas to spaces of ethnic differentiation and violence. It employs an ethnographic study to map the emergence and development of ethnic strongholds and frontiers, two kinds of socio-spatial settings conceptualized to help explain the spread and patterns of violence across Jos’s neighborhoods.

Ethnic groups living in the Mandara Mountains are assumed to be segmentary in structure, which is why scholarly literature portrays them as egalitarian societies. The configuration of the architectural landscape reveals a different reality. This article shows how the architectural landscapes of the Mandara Highlands are ideologically constructed to represent and legitimize hierarchies between clans and individuals. Physical entities appear as particular elements of social space, and as places socially constructed and tinged with ideologies. These fieldwork-based observations provide the foundation for interrogating the meaning of egalitarianism in African society.

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.

This article documents some of the forms of sociality engendered by the massive and growing presence of private security guards around Nairobi, Kenya. A focus on violence and the logic of an ideal of the use of violence in critical security studies literature obfuscates these networks in a similar way to idealizations of public space and the public sphere in anthropological literature on private security and residential enclaves. By looking at the close ties guards maintain with their homes in rural areas of Nairobi and the associations they make with people such as hawkers, it becomes clear that their presence in the city is creating new sets of valuations and obligations all the time. These forms of sociality are not galvanized by the threat of violence that the guards evoke; rather, they are engendered alongside and at cross-currents to the idealized, securitized landscape.

Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, has continued to offer—perhaps much more than his third novel, Arrow of God—the most vivid account of the process of early colonial penetration in Africa. This study examines Things Fall Apart through an analytical and conceptual framework that illuminates the five stages of colonialism in Africa. These five stages (exploration, expropriation, appropriation, exploitation, and justification) were necessary in order for colonialism to become both an effective tool for domination and a successful tool of domination; as such, they provide powerful glimpses into Achebe’s fictional representation of the cataclysm embodied by colonial intrusion, not only within the confines of the fictional Igbo universe that he depicts, but also throughout a sub-Saharan African world whose cultural and sociopolitical ethos were shaken to their core. An analysis of these stages, therefore, leads to an understanding of colonialism that defines it not as a series of specific historical events, spaces, and places, but rather as a process or a series of psycho-historical processes with a certain number of inescapable features that conspired to make it an effective tool of and for sustained political, cultural, and economic domination in sub-Saharan Africa. Achebe’s novel can be used as a tool that can help to decipher and foreground the psycho-historical processes inherent in what, ultimately, may be called “the psychology of colonialism.”

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 article focuses on disputes and protests around the inauguration of Niger’s first oil refinery in late 2011. Drawing on theory of the resource curse and the literature on African politics and the state, it analyzes the transformative potential of oil in Nigerien politics and society, showing how oil was received in an already well-structured political arena, sparking political conflicts rather than conflicts about oil. With the start of oil production adding fuel to these conflicts, it argues that in oil’s immediate presence, historically sedimented politics were played out through the idiom of oil, through which not only is oil-age Niger made a social and political reality, but political difference is also reconstructed, and patterns of domination are reinforced.

This article draws on the concept of “identity interests” to explain why commitment to the territorial integrity norm in the context of African peace processes has persisted over such a long period of time, even as continental and international contexts have changed. One major implication of this commitment to the territorial integrity norm is that third parties involved in peacemaking in Africa have consistently refrained from promoting a negotiated settlement that might pave the way for independence; they have only pushed for a territorial revision in a few instances. The role of major powers has been crucial with regard to the few successful territorial changes in Africa since 1960. An overview of all outcomes of mediation in territorial intrastate conflicts in Africa—as well as seven case studies—support this argument.

In the last decade, the rapes (of women) in, and the metaphoric raping (of natural resources) of, the Democratic Republic of Congo have received unprecedented attention from media, donors, and advocacy groups. Beginning in the early 2000s, these two narratives (the involvement of armed groups and state forces in illegal resource exploitation and the widespread prevalence of sexual violence in eastern DRC) merged to form a direct cause-consequence relationship, in which rape is framed as a tool for accessing mineral wealth. Through an analysis of media articles and reports of human rights organizations, this study traces the making of this rape-resources narrative, juxtaposing it with wider academic debates and critical scholarship. The narrative effectively focuses attention on a narrow set of actors and spaces in Congo’s conflicts, highlighting each of those actors/spaces in particular ways while obscuring the role of others. Because of this, key dynamics are missing from the narrative, such as historical context, gendered conflict dynamics, and armed group/civilian activity and mobilization, which are critical to understanding the scale and scope of violence in the region more broadly and the perpetration of instances of rape more specifically. The unraveling of the rape-resources narrative reveals its toxicity in limiting effective interventions and in closing down alternative narratives.

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.

In this study I hope to deconstruct dominant and popular homophobic discourses in Cameroon to offer a deeper analysis of the common association made between homosexuality, witchcraft, and cults. Through a closer engagement with rumors that suggest homosexuality, witches, and cults are working collectively and covertly to destroy Cameroonian society important issues of power, morality, and inequality emerge, providing a more complex understanding of homophobic violence. I argue that in order to address homophobic concerns in Cameroon, activists must contend with the complexity of epistemological differences and speak to the root causes of an emerging ressentiment.

While Nigeria has a vibrant press media landscape, freedom of the press is only rated as “partly free” by Freedom House, mostly due to political influences on reporting. Yet the extent to which these influences affect the quality of reporting remains insufficiently investigated. We address this gap by analyzing how three newspapers with different political affiliations report on conflict in the run-up to the 2015 elections. Our analyses indicate that biases in reporting are generally limited, and that while political pressures are real, they are most evident in editorial choices.