The DR Congo embarked upon decentralization reforms in 2006 to improve governance and accountability, undermine predation, corruption, and personal rule, bring government closer to the people, and promote local development. As of 2014, despite some regional variations, Congolese decentralization had instead increased the degree to which the state extracts the resources and incomes of its citizens. It had also fostered provincial centralization at the expense of local governments, produced largely unaccountable provinces governing with little transparency, and unleashed self-serving provincial elites. After providing original empirical evidence for these claims, this article suggests that decentralization was thwarted by the failure of formal reforms to affect informal ruling institutions and by an erroneous diagnosis of Congo’s governance failures that singled out the abuse of elites without identifying the generalized nature of the instrumentalization of sovereignty by officeholders at all levels of the state. The article concludes by using Congo’s experience to illustrate important flaws in decentralization reforms in Africa.

For several years, local radio stations in Uganda have broadcast “come home” messages that encourage the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to demobilize. Since the rebels began carrying out attacks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic, several international actors have introduced the same messages to these regions. This new effort has internationalized radio programming, benefited local radio stations, provided new forms of messaging, and functioned in collaboration with military actors. This article provides an overview of how “come home” messaging functions in different contexts, examines the effects of these actions, and calls for research into an important shift in military–humanitarian relations.

This article argues that one way in which internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees from Timbuktu, Mali, negotiated and made sense of the occupation of northern Mali in 2012 and the hardships of displacement was through joking. A genre of unofficial communication, joking asserted local truths and produced counternarratives. Sharing in this humorous reproduction helped to alleviate some of the anxieties of displacement and strengthen interpersonal relationships. The result was a communitas that reproduced the local Timbuktian community in exile.

Academic discussions of development continue to grow, yet critical engagements with communities affected by development interventions remain limited. Drawing from life history interviews conducted in southern Tanzania, this article details the varied experiences of development interventions among older people and how these affect broader understandings of progress. Many juxtapose their negative views of ujamaa villagization with more positive recollections of previous interventions (especially the Groundnut Scheme), which are infused with what is described here as “development nostalgia.” Perceptions of the past clearly inform the social, political, and economic aspirations forwarded today, with the richness of the constructed narratives adding further nuance to existing depictions of Tanzanian historiography.

Boundaries are technologies of power and knowledge that shape spatial and social realities and our understandings of them. This article examines the effects of boundary-making between Kenya and Ethiopia, and investigates the effects of borders on states of peace and conflict among Turkana, Samburu, Borana, Gabra, and Dassanetch of northern Kenya. If borders divide people, people benefit nonetheless from the environmental, social, and political entropy that borders generate by using the energy of spatial differences to advance their own individual and collective life projects.

Marriage cases discussed by Catholic missionaries in Uganda at the turn of the twentieth century showcase considerable diversity in relationships between women and men. While these cases reflect the turbulence of the late nineteenth century, the history of marriage and divorce in the region since around 700 CE demonstrates that diversity in marital arrangements was a long-standing phenomenon. This article sets out the history of aspects of marriage and divorce in Buganda, Bugwere, Busoga, and Bushana, and their ancestral communities to show how women and men conceptualized their domestic relationships and adapted them as they dealt with political and social change.

This article examines the ways in which childhood and youth experiences of living in polygynous households shape the aspirations of middle-class Muslim Senegalese women to companionate marriage. Increasingly, such aspirations are fulfilled through marriage with European men. In contrast to an enduring popular discourse according to which women live happily with polygyny throughout the Senegambian region, this article shows how some middle-class women’s choice to “marry out” is explicitly linked to family narratives and personal experiences of suffering. In a context in which many of these women face strong familial opposition to marriage with non-Muslim European men, this article suggests that the women’s narratives provide moral legitimacy to their “alternative” choices.

This article explores the care that husbands in Accra, Ghana, provide for wives who have been diagnosed with cancer. Making use of an inductive, qualitative approach, the study analyzes observations of and in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted with five married female cancer patients and their husbands over a ten-month period. The results suggest a strong association among husbands’ care, wives’ responses to husbands’ care, and cultural ideals of femininity and masculinity. The findings suggest that husbands’ selective and often limited gender-based investments in unpaid care work make their sick wives exceedingly vulnerable in a context in which care for the terminally ill takes place predominately in familial settings.