If the sudden downfall of Mali’s officially democratic system in early 2012 surprised many observers, the failings of the Malian state—including public disaffection with the political process, weak rule of law, and inadequate delivery of basic services—were widely known both at home and abroad. Focusing on activists based in Bamako, this article assesses Malian civil society’s response to these challenges since the March 2012 military coup and considers prospects for wider political engagement by the Malian public.

Mali’s 2012 coup d’état and subsequent rebellion created much hardship for those living in the northern and southern parts of the country. This article explores the changes that occurred during the period of uncertainty in the country, the role of the minimalist state, and the implications of these conditions for future development initiatives. The way in which Mali muddled through the 2012–2013 period has left two distinct aid landscapes: a heavily militarized northern region where aid from donors is focused on antiterrorism, and a southern zone of free-market intervention facilitated by donors.

Since Mali’s independence in 1960, the Tuareg, a minority ethnic group, have staged successive rebellions, with the major ones occurring in 1963, 1990, 2006, and 2012. While discussions of “the Tuareg issue” have sometimes led both the Malian and the international press, as well as scholars, to make inaccurate generalizations, it is true that almost all the armed conflicts of the past fifty years in Mali were originated by people of the Tuareg group. Therefore, many of their Malian compatriots hold the Tuareg people responsible for the destruction of life and human rights violations that have taken place since the beginning of 2012. This article focuses on the events of 2012 and their aftermath and explores some social, cultural, and political differences between northern Tuareg and southern Bamana peoples in particular. It asks two specific questions: Is there something about Tuareg society, culture, and politics (i.e., Tuareg identity) that causes an incompatibility with the Mali Republic? And if not, where has the Malian government failed through the successive regimes since independence?

This article offers a critique of widely disseminated portrayals of northern Malian Tuareg by outside media, which tend to portray all Tuareg as warriors and criminals and to project pseudo-scientific concepts of “race” onto relationships between Tuareg and other Malians, recalling the now discredited colonial “Hamitic Myth” in Rwanda. It also analyzes local oral historical accounts that present themes of Mali as both a protected fortress and welcoming crossroads, a country that both resists and absorbs intruders, and that also express concepts of identity based on language, culture, and flexible social affiliation. The article is based partly on interviews with internationally known local musicians who function as mediating “third voices,” and concludes with a discussion of wider implications of these findings for notions of voice, authority, and the mutual construction of ideas of Africa.

Every ethnic group in Mali has at least one social category of specialists in conflict mediation and resolution. These are casted groups whose duties include the maintenance of a moral as well as structural social order, even in times of great turmoil. Recent research on the activities of these actors shows that the role of traditional mediator has not vanished, but it has evolved through bureaucratic institutionalization. A thickly described case study of the formation of RECOTRADE, the largest nongovernmental organization of traditional communicators in West Africa, demonstrates how this traditional institution is keeping pace with the political and civil development of the country.

Claims of sexual violence against female conscripts by military commanders abound in the Eritrean National Service (ENS), but hitherto there has been no attempt to subject these claims to rigorous empirical scrutiny. This article is a partial attempt to fill the gap. Based on data collected through snowball sampling from 190 former conscripts in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, South Africa, Kenya, and Sweden who fled from the ENS, supplemented by data from systematically selected key informants who were interviewed in depth, it examines the extent to which female conscripts serving in the ENS were subjected to sexual violence and harassment by their commanders, including at the Sawa military training camp. The extensive data, based on the perceptions and experiences of respondents who served on average about six years, suggest that sexual abuse is rampant throughout the ENS, particularly among female conscripts who are assigned to work at the camp subsequent to the six months of military training.

This article explores the influence of nationalism and modernity in contemporary Zimbabwe and on the musical lives of Zimbabweans through an examination of muchongoyo, the signature dance–drumming tradition of Zimbabwe’s Ndau communities. Invoking the concept of “Mugabeism,” it illustrates how Shona nationalism and expectations of modernity have partially reshaped muchongoyo in the turmoil of contemporary Zimbabwe. As indigenous practices serve political ends, their values shift. Consequently, there are now two muchongoyos : one rooted in the unique history and values of Zimbabwe’s Ndau community, the other emerging from decades of political employment of indigenous music for the sake of nationalist discourse.

This article provides a ground-level view of market taxation in two local government areas in Ghana’s relatively disadvantaged northern region. It describes a system shaped by informal practices that are grounded in social relationships and collective norms, which sometimes foster greater equity and in other cases serve to reinforce existing inequalities. The evidence suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the highly informal and socially embedded realities of local tax collection, and the possibility that improved outcomes could be achieved by “working with the grain” of these inescapable local realities, while seeking to minimize potential costs of informality.