In this article I endorse the contention that humour presents a window onto the complicated social relationships and consciousness of speakers and listeners. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, I observe that improvised joking and the telling of standard jokes have proliferated over the past three decades. I suggest that we can understand both forms of humour as bids to construct intimate interpersonal relations, based on mutuality, in times of increased precarity. There are, nonetheless, important differences between these forms of humour. In Bushbuckridge, a long tradition of spontaneous and improvised joking between certain categories of persons stood at the very heart of kinship. The association of such joking with intimacy was evident in the general rule that one was only allowed to joke, particularly about sexual matters, with persons one was allowed to see naked. By engaging in such joking, villagers reinforced mutuality with kin, upon whom they relied for social security. By contrast, the (re)telling of standard jokes is a fairly recent practice. Unlike in joking between kin, the original composers of the jokes are anonymous and the butt of the jokes are fictitious third persons. This insulates listeners from direct embarrassment and the teller from retaliation. These jokes were told between male peers, and commented on the diminished status of men in contemporary times. By telling standard jokes, men provoked ‘laugher out of place’, in a bid to re-establish sociality in moments of distress and extend mutuality beyond the domains of kinship networks.

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.

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 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.

In rural Uganda, pregnant women struggle to access clinical care because of limited access to transportation and other barriers to travel, including delays in the maintenance and modernization of rural road infrastructure. This article analyses one community-led effort to address these gaps by providing free motorbike transport to pregnant women during labour. The programme is considered alongside broader trends in global health funding, in particular the rise of ‘appropriate technologies’, or the promotion of cheap, adaptive and flexible interventions that stand in contrast to an earlier focus in international health on building and modernizing state infrastructures for all. Drawing on anthropological studies of infrastructure, this article explores how qualities such as flexibility, improvisation and collaboration may radically expand healthcare infrastructure while also creating conditions of uneven use and inconsistencies of access that expose the limitations of targeted interventions. In its focus on the political and relational nature of infrastructures, this article highlights how healthcare projects are dependent as much on access to ‘hard’ healthcare resources (ambulances, medical technology) as they are on historically rooted, deeply localized and unevenly accessed webs of relations that shape access and connection to such resources, and that extend beyond clinical spaces.

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.

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.

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.

The increasing economic value of Majang forest land that accompanied the establishment of large, state-run coffee plantations and timber production has led to growing tensions between Majang people and ‘incoming’, resettled ‘highlanders’ or ‘migrants’ from the Ethiopian highlands (known in the local vernacular as Gaaleer), which often circulate around dynamic land transactions. In the early 2010s, the Ethiopian government introduced a new policy of land registration to settle these tensions by regulating uncontrolled land sales. This article explores how past land deals generated contests and grievances and how the formalization of land titling resulted in aggravating these tensions, even triggering violent conflict in 2014–15, rather than resolving them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Gambella’s Majang zone, this article examines how contests and grievances attached to different interpretations of past land transactions between Majang people and ‘highlanders’, and their political implications, heightened when the government attempted to formalize land tenure in the early 2010s. The article makes an important contribution to our understandings of African land tenure and land-related conflict.

The notion of ‘concrete Sape’ constitutes the central heuristic tool of this study. Inspired by the Congolese elegant art of dressing (La Sape) – a form of ostentatious elegance in contexts of precarity – it refers here to strategies of urban display and the simulation of state order through spectacular constructions in contexts marked by war or post-crisis. Much like the body of the sapeur, which masks social fragility under the guise of appearance, the concrete-clad city showcases an image of an urban modernity that hides inequalities, political instability and the structural weaknesses of the state. This metaphor enables a joint analysis of the logics of simulacra, extraversion, violence and legitimation at play in the political economy of concrete. This study is rooted in a comparative ethnography of the post-crisis real-estate boom observed in Kinshasa and Brazzaville since the 2010s. It combines direct observations, a photographic corpus of public and private buildings, participation in real-estate fairs, and over thirty semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. By bridging urban studies and the socio-anthropology of politics, it sheds light on the mechanisms of simulacra, violence and political legitimation embedded in the economy of concrete and construction in Central Africa, both within and beyond post-conflict contexts.

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’.

Conflict related to the ‘Boko Haram’ insurgency has ravaged north-east Nigeria and its neighbouring countries for over a decade. Much public and media attention has focused on the insurgents’ apparent hostility towards Western (boko) education. Yet, education has received relatively little attention within scholarship of the insurgency. Drawing on eighteen interviews and group conversations with former members conducted in 2021 and 2024, we explore what role disenchantment with Western education played in the recruitment of members, and to what extent critical views were nurtured and perpetuated during the insurgency. Mobilizing insights from education research, we highlight how Western knowledge occupied an ambiguous status among the insurgents. Avowed opposition to Western education was at loggerheads with the practical and tactical needs of the insurgency, which dominated decision making on the ground. Encounters and experiences after leaving the insurgency further convinced our respondents that Western education was useful. The article highlights that we cannot understand how violent jihadi groups view education by looking merely at their propaganda and tactics, but that we need to pay close attention to the on-the-ground experiences of ordinary members.

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.

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.

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.

The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, founded in British India in 1889, has many followers in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other West African countries, and has fostered cultural transformations that have rarely been discussed in scholarship on African–South Asian interactions. Through a history of media produced by and about the Ahmadiyya, this article shows how black and white photographs shaped a vibrant visual economy that constructed West African–South Asian interconnectedness in the midst of difference and discord. While Indian Ahmadiyya missionaries first deployed images as evidence for their controversial beliefs and to prove their success at conversion, the absorption of these personnel and their productions into emerging West African media infrastructures – educational publishing and journalism among them – created a wider visual repertoire that evoked complex emotional registers, including fear and mistrust as well as familiarity and fondness. West African and South Asian media makers interwove dreams, religious and journalistic communications, and digital archives of photographs to reveal religious, racial and gendered differences that played out in print and circulated well beyond any single audience. Visual and print media worked to diminish the Ahmadiyya’s foreignness and accommodate their differences as familiar, and thus played a critical role in cultivating cultural pluralism in new postcolonial West African nations.