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.

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.

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.