Mauritania is one of the African countries where the phenomenon of contemporary slavery is most prevalent today. The historical particularities inherent in this practice have been shaped by ethnocultural differences that still persist. The fight against this reality has been led by abolitionist initiatives that have emerged within civil society since the late 1970s. The most prominent organization in the fight against contemporary slavery in Mauritania is the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, better known as IRA Mauritania. This article examines the history, action and socio-political impact of this organization through the unpublished testimonies of some of its protagonists – direct victims of this reality. The analysis of oral memory presented here, based on various historically silenced voices, raises new hypotheses about the historical crossroads currently faced by a country where the phenomenon of slavery is linked to other emerging issues such as migration crises, gender issues and the climate colonialism of the twenty-first century.

Ewe and Guin-Mina people in Togo often use festival and ritual events as forums for cultural exchange and as opportunities to reinterpret and repurpose images and objects imported from India. Instead of focusing on large-scale commercial interactions, this article illustrates Afro-Indian cultural exchanges enacted microcosmically upon the canvas of West African bodies. I examine small-scale encounters between Ewe and Guin-Mina Vodun practitioners and South Asian merchants, paying close attention to ritual performances for Mami Wata – a pantheon of Pan-African water spirits often depicted as mermaids and venerated for their dominion over maritime trade. Specifically, I consider how ritual specialists devoted to Mami Wata index histories of trade with Indian merchants through performances that embody Hindu chromolithograph images of deities like Dattatreya and Shiva as depictions of local water spirits. Focusing on movements, gestures and transoceanic flows of currency, goods and objects present in Togolese Mami Wata veneration, this article teases out the threads of critical consumerism, gender fluidity and choreographic practices that accompany such ceremonies, especially during moments of transformative copresence with spirits. Exploring ways Ewe and Guin-Mina performers in Togo use stylized gestures and adornments to transform understandings of commercial relations with foreigners into sources of agency and transformation, I examine ritual choreographies in public festivals and private rituals as oceanic intersections: material representations of desires for social, transcultural and transnational mobility.

Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of cultural festivals across West Africa. In this article, we argue that border festivals are distinctive. They take on the work of cultural codification in a context where borders often magnify differences between partitioned communities. They also help to shape border governance, because, as moments of exception, they provide a platform on which it is possible to variously criticize and lobby politicians. The article compares two festivals on the Ghana–Togo border – Agbamevoza in partitioned Agotime and Godigbeza in Aflao – and reveals contrasting dynamics. In Agotime, festival organizers (who largely reside in Accra) have managed to involve the border agencies. In a context where crossings have been relatively unhindered, demands have focused on external support to develop the kente weaving industry. In Aflao, by contrast, harassment by border officials, extended closures of the border and decisions to re-route traffic away from the border crossing with Lomé have created friction. In 2022, there were explicit demands for freedom of movement and for recognition of Aflao as a transnational community that embodied the spirit of regional integration.

This article aims to expand the epistemological limits of the Indian Ocean by examining distinct examples that link the African and Indian worlds through objects, media and unconventional trajectories of exchange. While the histories of trade, migration and the circulation of objects between India and Africa, and along the western Indian Ocean rim, have been studied extensively, this article focuses on minor transnational circulations that compel us to reimagine African–Indian exchanges. In other words, I trace the transits of objects to emphasize non-linear mobilities, other networks, and rhizomatic imaginations of Africa and India that connect distant places and practices. First, I look at the arrival of African saints in western India during pre-modern times and their intertwined histories with precolonial empires and the Indian Ocean slave trade. Trade items and ritual objects associated with these saints connect them to terrains of exchange in the Misr (Egypt), Al-Habash (Ethiopia) and Nubia (Sudan and Nile Valley) regions, all important nodes that linked West Africa and the Indian Ocean through complex trans-Sahelian networks of traders, pilgrims and enslaved people. I then examine the circulation of trade goods, such as beads, textiles and umbrellas, that were produced in India for West African markets during the transatlantic slave trade, illustrating how colonial transcontinental networks used objects from the Indian Ocean to support their Atlantic enterprises through a complex system of commodity exchanges. The central objective is to demonstrate how lesser-known processes of circulation and transversal ontologies reveal the fraught and interconnected histories of the Africana Atlantic and Indian Ocean universe.

India’s 1947 independence and the violent birth of Pakistan had a major and still unexplored impact in West Africa. Despite existing studies assessing Gandhi’s intellectual impact on African leaders, little scholarship has examined African perceptions of events in India and Pakistan. Examining the case of Nigeria, this article moves from a brief history of Nigerians’ interest in South Asian politics during the 1940s to identify two key elements of Nigerians’ responses. First, it demonstrates how Nigerian politicians, journalists and religious leaders advanced ambiguous and nuanced critiques of Indian politics on the eve of independence. The possibility of a ‘Nigerian Gandhi’ particularly preoccupied observers, who made comparisons between the Indian leader and local nationalists. Second, the article argues that the formation of Pakistan had a largely unrecognized impact on Nigerian political culture in the late 1940s. In a crisis about separatism and ‘Pakistanism’, Nigerian commentators engaged substantively with the ideals represented by this new state and the violence of Partition itself. The article argues that reactions to Asia were differentiated by region, and Northern Nigerian intellectuals developed separate critiques of South Asian affairs. Rather than understanding South Asia’s impact on West Africa simply in terms of ‘influence’, this article reveals how Africans drew on South Asia to map their own futures.

To inhabit the city is to inhabit a layered and contentious space, a space whose meaning cannot be comprehended without closely navigating its layers. This article analyses two images and representations – a tweet and a song – as narrative forms that reveal the palimpsestic nature of Nairobi in the context of the city’s expressway, which was constructed between September 2020 and July 2022. I read the expressway as a physical infrastructure for mobility as well as a material and metaphorical representation of urban marginalization, which at the same time materializes various forms of social marginalization and exclusion that predate it. The narrative forms, critically analysed together, underscore the palimpsestic nature of the city that would otherwise be obscured should readers be blinded by the iconicity of the expressway. I consider both the images, the tweet and the song alongside the arguments of Michel de Certeau, Karin Barber and Setha Low on urban aesthetics. While de Certeau provides lenses through which we understand the practices of everyday life in the city, Barber makes a case for urban infrastructure and the growth of popular culture, and Low focuses on how power relations influence the social construction of space. Ultimately, I argue for a reading of urban spaces using a synthesized literary approach as a nuanced way of understanding such spaces. This approach weaves together different media and approaches – both textual and visual – in its reading of the materialities of urban spaces and how meaning is constructed and contested within those spaces.

The article interrogates the livelihood responses that households in marginal farming and fishing communities rely on as ways of adapting to environmental degradation due to oil spillages and gas flaring in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. It demonstrates how local perceptions and understandings of environmental pollution help communities frame livelihood responses to environmental problems in their domain. Relying on an analysis of ethnographic field-based data, the article identifies a plurality of adaptation strategies in farming and fishing. It reveals that these strategies are palliative and unable to mitigate the long-term environmental effects of oil and gas extraction in the region. This situation incentivizes a gradual shift from farming and fishing to crude oil-based livelihood activities, particularly artisanal crude oil refining, known as ‘kpo-fire’. The study foregrounds kpo-fire as a predominant maladaptive response, which, despite being an economic alternative for many, exacerbates environmental pollution; this results in a vicious circle, which is emblematic of what the article refers to as the ‘livelihood dysfunction trap’.

The ubiquitous presence of motorbike taxi drivers on the streets of Kampala, Uganda, has long been the subject of academic inquiry. This article interrogates the visible political symbols displayed on the motorbikes and the clothing of drivers, arguing that the aesthetic choices of drivers offer new ways of imagining Ugandan state pasts and futures. While the 2021 Ugandan presidential election has often been framed as a binary choice between President Museveni and Robert Ssentamu (popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine), I propose that drivers’ conscious decision to display divergent political symbols must be understood through the history of cosmopolitanism in Kampala. Taking seriously the diversity of political visions suggested by the aesthetic markers of drivers enables us to appreciate the multifaceted challenges and possibilities for Uganda’s political future.

Projects seeking to indigenize STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) for the public have recently emerged in digital spaces in Africa. These ‘STEM-for-the-public’ projects are conceptualized within the framework of ‘indigenization’ that cuts across the STEM and social science fields. I identify two paradigms in the indigenization literature: the language (L) paradigm and the methodology–conclusion dyad (MCD) paradigm. Although STEM-for-the-public projects fall within the L paradigm, they sometimes exhibit the MCD paradigm by drawing on oral culture and other forms of indigenous knowledge. These projects constitute an attempt at a cultural solution to what I describe as ‘the problem of unequal access and relevance’ (Problem-UAR), which plagues a particular kind of society that I describe as ‘wholesale-origin societies’ (such as those of Africa, south of the Sahara). Based on a digital ethnography, I show that, although they have had some recognizable impacts, operating in different modes, using a variety of linguistic approaches, covering various STEM topics, and adopting different modality frames, STEM-for-the-public projects, in their current forms, are not the ultimate solution to Problem-UAR because: (1) they generally do not address the classroom side of Problem-UAR; (2) they largely exclude offline publics; and (3) they have reached only a significantly small portion of their target online populations.

Since the 2000s, digital entrepreneurship has been framed by policymakers, NGOs and international corporations as a solution to Africa’s high youth unemployment. In this article, I explore how the promise of serial digital entrepreneurship – the idea that repeated business failure will eventually result in a profitable digital start-up – lured young adult Akan digital entrepreneurs into downwardly mobile trajectories. Building on the recent anthropology of (de-)kinning, I show that young adult Akan were given and/or negotiated a window of opportunity during which their families allowed them to invest most of their resources in establishing their own middle-class career and marriage. As families tried to close this window out of concern for the young adults’ ability to achieve a middle-class lifestyle and redistribute opportunities to siblings, serial entrepreneurship could encourage entrepreneurs to distance themselves from their kin in their continued unprofitable pursuit of digital start-up success. When these young adults finally wanted to quit entrepreneurship, they could find themselves far removed from obligations of care and opportunity from kin and the waged job market, trapped in the precarious pursuit of digital start-up ‘dreams’. This article contributes to debates on the African middle classes by conceptualizing downward social mobility in Ghana as the de-kinning that occurs when family members fail to reach mutual understandings about how to pursue middle-class aspirations.

This article, based on eighteen months of fieldwork with an organization of women with disabilities in Uganda, considers discourses about bodilymental variation that circulated among members and non-members of the organization. I identify two common discourses, based on the words obulema (disability) and abaceke (weak people). The terms are linguistically and conceptually divergent. Obulema (disability) is an individual condition, referencing a non-normative embodied state that conveys disadvantage. Conversely, recognizing someone as an omuceke (a weak person) requires attending to a person’s bodymind and their socio-economic circumstances and relationships. While obulema is an objectified individual category connected to citizenship and defined through the legal-political realm, whether someone is an omuceke is determined interpersonally. Following Oche Onazi’s suggestion that rights-based and relational approaches to disability justice, while fundamentally different, might not be incompatible, I investigate their interaction during a land dispute between a woman with visual impairment and her neighbours. I combine analysis of how different ways of talking about bodilymental difference invoke divergent logical forms of obligations with attention to the relational contexts in which these obligations apply in practice. This novel approach offers a resource for understanding the complex intersections between discourses about bodymind variation, particularly in postcolonial settings.

A Yoruba ritual – the Oodua ritual festival in Ile-Ife – has been sustained over a long period, but has been adjusted under the pressure of modernity. Its relevance as a cultural practice is being asserted in multiple ways in today’s Nigeria. Ethno-nationalism is a key factor in the ritual in contemporary Ile-Ife in the sense that the Olokun Festival Foundation (OFF) is the agency through which the ethno-nationalism of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) is inscribed on the ritual. Although it professes to be a culture-promoting affiliate of the OPC, the OFF’s involvement in the ritual facilitates the presence of the OPC – a popular Yoruba ethno-nationalist movement – and thereby results in significant modifications to the ritual. Hence, the ritual has become an embodiment of new significations through which understandings of the contemporary face of Yoruba ethno-nationalism in Nigeria can be expanded. In sum, a combination of symbolic anthropological and sociological approaches reveal that the ritual in its modified form is culturally restrictive and socially integrative.

He may have died tragically young, but Binyavanga Wainaina’s brilliance lives on. His caustic skewering of white journalism – ‘How to write about Africa’ – was first published in Granta in 2005 (Wainaina 2005). It remains a vital anti-guide to sweeping generalizations and cheap condescension. By comparison, writing about African universities should be easy. After all, aren’t most of us already insiders within, if not institutionalized by, higher education? There lies the rub. Academography, to use Eli Thorkelson’s pithy neologism, is much harder than it looks.

In his article ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah Arowosegbe discusses the trajectory of universities in postcolonial Africa, drawing particularly on the experiences of public universities in Nigeria. Arowosegbe accounts for the state of the institutions against the backdrop of ‘hostile material conditions and uncongenial political control’, which continue to ‘undermine institutional autonomy and the integrity of scholarship’. This think piece reflects on the particular case of the state of humanities scholarship in Nigeria in the face of persistent onslaught on academia.

When the American political scientist James C. Scott passed away in July 2024, tributes praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation.1 Building on years of ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, his numerous books offered new ways of thinking about subaltern resistance, as well as the mechanisms of state oppression and control. A self-professed anarchist, he organized against the Vietnam War as a junior faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the latter part of the 1960s, and he maintained a forty-six-acre farm for decades while teaching at Yale. While obituaries widely remembered Scott as a figure of integrity, some dissonant voices on social media commented more negatively on his involvement with the CIA as a young man and as a leader in the United States National Student Association (USNSA). The political scientist Karen Puget first brought this episode in Scott’s life to light in a book that carefully exposed the ties of the USNSA with US intelligence (Puget 2015). Puget showed how, in the 1950s and 1960s, what was then the most important student organization in the USA allowed itself to be fully infiltrated by the government. The young liberal-minded students at the helm of the organization worked hand in hand with CIA handlers to curb Soviet influence among their peer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. For a few years, after graduating from Williams College and before embarking on his doctoral studies at Yale, Scott occupied a prominent role among these young shadow Cold Warriors, first as the USNSA’s representative in Paris and later as its vice president in charge of international affairs.

Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe’s essay ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’ sheds significant light on political and economic influences, freedom within academia, and the role of these institutions within wider socio-political contexts. I want to endorse some of his proposals and make additional suggestions to comprehend the complexities and potential directions of African universities.

What is the state of copyright in Africa today, when specialists in the field, notably in the USA, are sounding the alarm? Taking as its starting point a right that emerged in the West in the twilight of the nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which copyright is discussed, established and experienced in sub-Saharan Africa. It questions the relevance of the vocabulary used and asks how Africa can be made intelligible in the context of a heterogeneous world. Since the 1990s, international organizations have promoted and imposed the economic notion of material goods, inventing a new tradition. The result is a heritage, the commons, that is reduced to a resource divorced from any historical or social context. How can we go beyond these rights, which are a source of a ‘promise economy’ for creators, to promote imprescriptible and inalienable human rights? How can experienced creators resist copyright that takes them back to the Middle Ages?

In his latest article, ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe argues convincingly that public universities in Africa are in crisis, and that this crisis reflects the failure of postcolonial states to build the societies promised by anti-colonial liberation. He is certainly correct that the political economy of higher education (HE) in postcolonial Africa is a much-neglected topic, and his article is even more welcome for that reason. As a scholar with an extensive career in Nigerian public universities, Arowosegbe has also undertaken research fellowships in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa and the USA. Now he finds himself at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has experienced much from within and reflected deeply from afar on the state of universities in Nigeria and across the continent. His article is a serious work of reflection and scholarship, crafted and refined over years of engagement. Therefore, his serious charges on the state of the universities in Africa cannot be dismissed lightly.

Arowosegbe’s (2023) treatise on the crisis of higher education across the African continent raises many issues about the failures of Africa’s postcolonial states and the situations of the continent’s public universities. His courage in bringing to the fore the predicaments of Africa’s public universities is commendable. Two issues in particular attract my attention. First, while he underscores the strained relations between the state and the academy and recognizes the existence of some divergent ideological underpinnings therein, his account neglects the impacts of ideological contradictions on society’s political stability and socio-economic development. Second, his account omits the quandaries of private universities in Africa, an aspect of higher education across the continent that should not be overlooked if one is to holistically appreciate the predicaments of Africa’s universities within the context of the role of the postcolonial state.