This article examines the works of one of the earliest Yoruba poets, Denrele Adetimikan Ọbasa (1879–1945), a member of the local intelligentsia in colonial Nigeria. In my assessment of the poet as a culture activist and local intellectual, I draw on biographical information, extensive archival research and relevant textual illustration. The central argument of the article is that Ọbasa exploits Yoruba communal oral resources for ideas, themes and other linguistic influences in his poetry. Therefore, the essay explores the creative ability of Ọbasa to preserve different forms of oral literary material in his poetic composition and how he uses the folkloric materials as instruments for raising the social consciousness of his readers. At this level, the article argues, Ọbasa transforms oral traditions into metaphorical and symbolic language that best articulates his political or philosophical positions. Thus, orality is not static, but dynamic, flexible and adaptable to change. The main article offers translations of excerpts from Ọbasa's poetry, while the online supplementary material offers more complete samples of Ọbasa's poems.

Many words in Yoruba frustrate trans-lingual transportation by the sheer complexity of their polysemic range. Such words are so culture-bound that they do not translate easily to English, especially when their metaphysical polyvalence in Yoruba has no equivalent in English. Therefore, my translation of Ọbasa's poems in the appendices below yields place to mediation, as I am constrained to try out or devise a series of strategies of transposition and transference, which in the words of Ọṣundare leads to ‘kiss and quarrel’ between the concerned languages. According to him, when two languages meet, they achieve a tacit understanding on the common grounds of similarity and convergence, then negotiate, often through strident rivalry and self-preserving altercations, their areas of dissimilarity and divergence.

This article seeks to examine the dynamic transformation in the system of labour mobilization and the consequent intermingling of peoples of diverse cultural background in northern Sidama, Ethiopia. It investigates the different labour recruitment strategies deployed in the study area at different times, ranging from traditional to hired labour. In the former case, the household plays a major role in the recruitment and supply of agricultural labour, whereas in the latter case, ‘trans-locality’ reinforced by migration becomes central to the labour history of the region. In the 1940s and 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie I granted large estates of land in the study area to absentee landowners who started schemes of commercial coffee farming. The subsequent expansion of commercialized coffee farming in a locality called Wondo Gänät (northern Sidama) from the 1950s onwards was responsible for the introduction of agricultural wage labour into the wider region. There was no local surplus labour to satisfy the labour needs of the new coffee farms. This void was later filled by Kembata, Hadiya and Wolayita migrant labourers who flocked into the study area from regions widely noted for their scarcity of arable land. This translocal movement of workers paved the way for the beginning of wage employment and eventually the commodification of farm labour in line with capitalist agriculture. Although commercial coffee plantations provided the initial stimulus for labour commodification in the study area, sugar cane-based cash cropping has helped it flourish even further. I argue in this article that the imperial land grants of the late 1940s and 1950s were an important milestone both for the agricultural history of the study area and for the organization of farm labour. Most importantly, I also argue that some of the social tensions and conflicts that often haunt contemporary northern Sidama are legacies inherited from the labour migrations of the 1950s and 1960s and the demographic heterogeneity that ensued.

Dash in pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when the dash became attached to the indentured labour contracts that the Spanish Empire brought from Cuba to their last colony, Spanish Guinea? On the island of Fernando Pó, which came to be almost wholly populated by Nigerian labour migrants, the conditional gift in the form of a large wage advance produced a particularly intense contradiction. In the historiography of unfree labour, the excess wage advance is thought to create conditions for the perpetuation of bondage through debt. However, in imperial contexts, the wage advance did not generate compliance and immobility; exactly the opposite – it produced unprecedented waves of further escalation and dispersed flight. The dash was pushed up by workers themselves and relayed by informal recruiters. Together they turned this lynchpin of indentured labour and debt peonage into a counter-practice that almost led to the collapse of the plantations in the 1950s. The trajectories of the dash led to a more pointed version of the foundational thesis of global labour history: namely, that it was actually free labour, not unfree labour, that was incompatible with labour scarcity-ridden imperial capitalism.

As contract farming gains ground as a form of agricultural production in Southern Africa, there is growing interest in its effects on patterns of investment and production as well as in its potential to provide small farmers with access to export markets. However, the relation between contract farming and the region's long history of labour migration has largely escaped analysts and scholars working on Southern Africa. This article traces the changing livelihoods of those who experienced the demise of the migrant labour system and displacement during the civil war, and who now engage in contract farming in Angónia, a densely populated district in Tete Province, central Mozambique. In the decades since the end of the war, contract farming thrived among former migrants with access to land and few alternative sources of income and employment. If historical labour migration from Angónia involved attempts by employers to externalize the responsibility for social reproduction onto households, contract farming amounts to the internalization by households of the opportunities, risks and tensions involved in the production of high-value export commodities. By analysing farmers’ accounts of producing under contract and linking this to their households’ longer histories of labour mobilization, this article sheds light on people's experiences of working for wages, working on their own account and hiring workers, as households became the new sites of commodity production.

As part of a growing working-class movement that sought full legal status as employees in South Africa, stable urban residence and union recognition, female African factory workers became part of a dynamic new labour movement emanating from the shop floor. At the same time, this new role allowed them to challenge patriarchal structures of authority in the factory, the community and the home. This article examines the gender dimension of a bitter inter-union rivalry that beset Durban's Frame textile complex during the early 1980s. With African unions at last recognized by the apartheid state, Frame sought to bolster the strength of a compliant company union in order to thwart the organizing drive of a more confrontational independent union, an affiliate of the newly established Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). This union rivalry was fought out in the courts as well as inside the factory, in the streets of Durban's townships, and in an African workers’ hostel in nearby Clermont. The legal dispute generated affidavits by women workers attesting to the pressures they faced to join the company union and their reasons for preferring FOSATU. This evidence shows that African women successfully challenged the patriarchal authority of male managers, security personnel, indunas and male co-workers at Frame in order to join an independent union.

In Niger, there is an increasing rejection of politik (a term with highly pejorative connotations): that is, party politics and the politics of democracy, characterized by personal rivalries and power struggles between clans and factions. But there is a direct link (albeit not a causal one) between the social perceptions of intra-familial rivalries and the social perceptions of political rivalries. The archetypical relationship among the baab-izey (children of one father but different mothers) is characterized by competition and jealousy. This is a product of the latent rivalry that pits co-wives against each other. Polygamy is clearly at odds with a number of received ideas and clichés about ‘the African family’ as primarily a locus of support and solidarity. Such formal social norms may reign in public situations, but in private de facto practical norms give rise to subtle discriminations and the omnipresence of more or less hidden conflicts within the family. The same is true for the political microcosm of Niger. While the public norm of the concern for the public good is supposed to regulate political behaviours, rivalry and jealousy are structural components of the political world. The baab-izey pattern is frequently used in reference to politicians. Political conflicts are above all personal/factional conflicts in which friends and supporters are implicated, and are rivalries of proximity. In the familial space as in the political space, ‘magico-religious entrepreneurs’ (i.e. experts in the occult) are merely an ‘accelerator’ of these conflicts: they reinforce suspicions about the familial or political entourage, which, in turn, intensify rivalries.

In contemporary Ghana, adult children are considered responsible for the care of aged parents. Within this idealized framework, two aspects of eldercare are overlooked. Firstly, such a narrative obscures the role of non-kin and extended kin in providing eldercare in southern Ghana historically and in the present. Secondly, it hides the negotiations over obligations and commitments between those who manage eldercare and those who help with an ageing person's daily activities. It is in this latter role that non-kin and extended kin are significant in eldercare, while closer kin maintain their kin roles through the management, financial support and recruitment of others. This article examines recruitment to eldercare and the role of kin and non-kin in eldercare in three historical periods: the 1860s, the 1990s and the 2000s, centred on Akuapem, in southern Ghana. In particular, I show that helping an aged person relies on previous and expected entrustments, in which more vulnerable, dependent and indebted persons are most likely to be recruited to provide care.

This article considers the reconstruction of Rwanda's post-genocide music industry through the national music competition, Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It explores local ideas about ‘playback’ and ‘live’ music, and argues that these two performative categories can be understood as wider metaphors for the relationship between the Rwandan state and its citizens, particularly Rwandan youth. On the one hand, Guma Guma aims to create the ideal post-genocide celebrity subject who will ‘play back’ a unified, de-ethnicized Rwandan identity with body and words. On the other, during the first two seasons of the competition, audiences demanded ‘live’ performance and Guma Guma prompted heated debate about ‘taboo’ topics, revealing enduring differences along socio-economic, ethnic and regional lines. Rather than affirm an inclusive Rwandan identity, Guma Guma hinted at its fragility and underscored the multiple and conflicting ways in which young people identify themselves and evaluate ‘truth’ in the post-genocide era. The article contributes not only to literature on popular culture in Africa, but also to studies that focus on mediation and changes in recording technology. Although scholars have quite rightly attempted to dissolve the boundary between the live and the mediated, I suggest that the boundary continues to do cultural and political work, particularly in developmental states.

In Ghana, cultural festivals, usually initiated and organized by the chiefs, provide public arenas where local and regional political elites voice demands vis-à-vis central government, and where national politicians canvass for support. Festivals offer commercial opportunities, forums to promote ‘development’, and occasions for entertainment. Yet advocating for ‘our own culture’ stands out as their very raison d’être, offering a frame for cultural entrepreneurs to organize performances that express and reconfigure local styles of music and dance to fit national formats. In this article, we examine such processes of cultural creation for the Kakube Festival in Nandom, a paramount chiefdom in north-western Ghana. We analyse the cultural building blocks and their evolution during the festival's history as well as the context of changing national politics of cultural heritage in which the festival developed. We discuss the invention of a cultural festival to create local alliances and stake claims at the regional and national political level, and how the desire to assert a presence in the national political and cultural arena has transformed the ways in which local culture is defined and presented. We examine the tensions at the heart of such an event, where traditions of chiefly patronage and allegiance meet the requirements of modern political and bureaucratic systems of funding, and the criteria of excellence in cultural performance. Music and dance are essential components and we analyse the evolution and adaptation of these elements alongside the critical path management of the event that has led to its local and national profile.