The introduction of Ugandan Sign Language in Acholi, northern Uganda, was part of a growing internationally linked disability movement in the country and was set within the framework of development policy and human rights-based approaches. In this context, Ugandan Sign Language appeared as a technology of development. But how did the appropriation of Ugandan Sign Language change deaf people’s lives, their being-in-the-world, in Acholi? In using the theoretical approach of existential and instrumental perspectives on technologies by Martin Heidegger, this article analyses the complex transitions following the appropriation of Ugandan Sign Language on international, national and local levels. The disability movement – including Ugandan Sign Language projects – reached Acholi during the time of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and Ugandan national forces. Displacement brought scattered deaf people together in towns and camps, where Ugandan Sign Language was introduced through workshops and institutions including churches. This created new forms of communication and possibilities of sociality. After the war, gender differences emerged, as many deaf women returned to rural homes where they had few opportunities to communicate with other sign language users.

In Uganda’s refugee policy framework, food aid targets the most vulnerable – among them people with disabilities – using a categorization system. This article explores the entanglements of this technology of food distribution with disabled people’s socialities. It reveals that the system does not achieve its proposed rationale of creating equal opportunities for people who are disadvantaged within Uganda’s refugee policy of self-reliance, and that it falls short in enabling disabled people to fulfil roles and responsibilities. Nevertheless, food aid is a significant contribution that allows refugees with disabilities to cultivate family and non-kin relationships. Exploring these interdependent relations around food aid calls into question the ideas of equality and independence as fundamental principles of living together.

The Ugandan effort to provide AIDS education for the entire population raised questions about how to reach people with disabilities. Based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Deaf people in Kampala, this study examined how communication technologies are used in general by Deaf people, and what is specific to communicating about HIV and AIDS. It found that communication technologies, whose purpose is to mediate information, are themselves mediated by social relations. Two contrasts are apparent: between types of technology and types of relationships. The ‘old’ technologies – broadcast and print – often depend on mediation by hearing people, who create the messages and explain audio information to Deaf associates. The ‘new’ digital technologies in the form of smartphones allow Deaf people to communicate directly with one another and facilitate new forms of Deaf sociality, both online and in person. They convey information about AIDS prevention directly, obviating the need to discuss sex with family members of the parental generation, which is culturally sensitive. Smartphones are highly appreciated by Deaf people but the costs of obtaining and using them exclude many.

While mobility-assistive devices ease movement and independence of persons with disabilities, their use may depend on their social and symbolic meaning. This article departs from our observation that elderly people in Wakiso in Uganda own a variety of assistive technologies yet do not utilize them all equally. Our findings are based on data collected through conversations, interviews and observations of thirty elderly people visited in their homes between July 2016 and January 2017. We found that elderly people with mobility disabilities valued devices for the greater autonomy they afforded, although dependence was also valued in some situations. The source or provenance of a device imbued it with meaning. Holding onto it regardless of how much one used it was in a way like holding onto the social relationship that the artefact represented, and the same can be said of abandoning it. Devices were also valued according to the manner in which they portrayed the user to the rest of the world – either positively as cosmopolitan and cared for, or negatively as sickly.

In moral careers of personhood and subjectivity of people who are mobility impaired, technologies such as mobility aids can become intertwined with teleologies of personal progress. This article examines how technologies shaped and expressed personal growth and social identity among those who took part in transnational trade between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Engaging with a particular socio-technical environment facilitates both personal movement and cross-border mobility, and therefore becomes central to the ways in which individuals present themselves as ‘losing complexes’ – that is, their perceived frustrations about their disability. Exchanging a stick for a crutch or a hand-cranked tricycle for a wheelchair facilitates different forms of movement and expresses how one seeks to navigate between embarrassment, pride and respectability. Mobility aids thus serve as an index of different moments in moral careers of progress and decline, while their complementarity or incompatibility with public infrastructure is instrumental in creating and disaggregating social assemblages of disabled people. Through the rise and collapse of border trade between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, I discuss how crutches, cargo tricycles, wheelchairs and ferries shaped socialities and subjectivities over the long term. Considering the role of technology problematizes analyses of moral careers of personhood as attributed by others, drawing attention to personal agency and entanglement with a socio-technical environment.

This article aims to shed light on the institutions involved in spreading a ‘culture of rehabilitation’ and distributing devices (crutches, wheelchairs and protheses) in Tigray, where rehabilitation is strictly bound to the development agenda and to the ‘modernization’ of the country. Moreover, it questions the ways in which people, in practice, deal with such devices: in some cases, they are perceived as useful; in others, they are considered as something requiring a hard process of adjustment and marking a bodily difference. How is the ‘deviced’ body experienced? Are there some ‘techniques of the body’ that resist the biopolitical devices imposed by the culture of rehabilitation? I answer these questions through evidence collected during ethnographic fieldwork carried out between October 2014 and August 2015 in the regional state of Tigray, Ethiopia.

Nine Ghanaian private banks collapsed during the country’s 2017–19 financial crisis. Apart from public audits that revealed liquidity problems and large portfolios of non-performing loans, the crisis generated vibrant debate on ‘indigenous banks’ as integral to national economic sovereignty. At the centre of these debates was a contested central bank-led project to inject equity in five struggling Ghanaian banks through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT). Set against the historical dominance of foreign banks in West Africa and Ghana’s recent history of political fault lines, this article explores the moral discourses and popular discontents of harnessing an SPV – a device typically used to isolate financial risk – for a desire for African economic sovereignty. Drawing on banking archives, public debates and fieldwork in a private bank selected as a benefactor of the SPV, I focus on the contests of value that emerge when costly banking sector reforms meet a critical public that doubts the sincerity of politicians and bankers as economic ‘reformers’. Arguing that ‘indigenous banks’ became a moral category that embedded abstractions of finance in a nationalist discourse of affect and sentiment, this article illuminates the long history of centring domestic ownership of financial infrastructures in postcolonial African economic policymaking.

Africanists have written much about interactions between multiple currencies in Africa, yet paperwork-based regulations that apply to these interactions remain less studied. Meanwhile, ethnographic studies of paperwork examine the roles of documents more in state administration than in commercial transactions. Based on ethnographic research with individuals and institutions involved in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville during a severe foreign exchange (forex) shortage from 2016 to 2021, this article argues that the participants in forex transactions manoeuvre paperwork to regulate the speed of the forex outflow – where paperwork functions as what I term ‘bureaucratic valves’. Responding to the outflow of forex caused by the oil price slump since 2015, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) required numerous documents from buyers of forex to justify their demand. This policy slowed down international money transfers because it took more effort to meet the paperwork requirements. Yet banks, money-transfer agencies and individuals in Congo subsequently developed their own paperwork-based mechanisms to cope with this change. These manoeuvres show that paperwork is a flexible and essential tool for adjusting transactions for different participants, especially in the money markets and in (central) banking in Africa.

Not long after his election as prime minister of Ethiopia, Dr Abiy Ahmed declared that the country would privatize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio Telcom, opening up sectors once considered off limits to foreign capital as part of his medemer reforms. On the surface, it might appear as if the Ethiopian leader was signalling a greater embrace of neoliberal (or market liberalizing) policies through his advocacy of privatization. However, this article interprets the call not as an ‘opening up’ to the demands of global capitalism, but as a calculated policy decision existing within the logics of the state’s developmentalist ideology. Through an analysis of the intellectual foundations and institutional evolution of the country’s privatization programme, I argue that the Ethiopian government privatizes SOEs as a revenue-generating strategy that augments state economic power by capitalizing on incomes gained through development investments – using the case of the domestic beer industry as my ethnographic example. By doing this, I unsettle assumptions about the meaning and uses of privatization within a developmentalist framework, demonstrating how Ethiopian leaders contend with global ideas, producing innovative strategies of resource mobilization to promote economic growth while protecting local sovereignty – a distinct form of African state capitalism.

In 2015, the Central Bank of West African States selected a private credit bureau to build a digital platform to collect and analyse financial data across the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union, including the activities of credit cooperatives and microfinance agencies that serve many West African borrowers. The credit-reporting platform promises to produce new and valuable knowledge about borrowers’ creditworthiness and risk. But valuable in what ways and for whom? Private credit bureaus rely on vast arrays of personal and financial data in order to produce credit reports and consumer credit scores that claim to represent the creditworthiness of individual borrowers. Cooperative loan officers, instead, understand creditworthiness to be highly variable and rely on relational metrics in order to determine risk as well as carefully overseeing existing loans to ensure their timely repayment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with loan officers at a small-scale credit cooperative in Lomé, Togo, this article examines how the impending arrival of a private credit bureau and new credit-reporting technologies highlights the distinction between the ways in which credit bureaus and loan officers understand the nature of financial risk, as well as the centrality of loan officers and their management of borrower debt in sustaining the field of small-scale lending in Togo.

According to contemporary investors on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa (Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières de l’Afrique de l’Ouest or BRVM), President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s post-independence plan to privatize state-owned enterprises in Côte d’Ivoire gave birth to the region’s financial market. Yet the bourse’s original promise of ‘indigenous’ control of financial investment has long gone unrealized. In response, a West African investor advocacy organization is coordinating a regional awareness programme that introduces ‘the culture of the stock exchange’ to an audience of West Africans largely unfamiliar with financial securities. Members of this shareholders’ association share a critique of elite monetary institutions and advance in their place a more popular vision of savings, investment and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic research in Abidjan and Dakar, I analyse how these petits porteurs (small shareholders) frame the morality and politics of their investments. The petits porteurs often make good money on the market, but even when they take on ‘crisis-level’ losses they nevertheless extoll the virtues of transparency, formality and control that the stock exchange is thought to provide. In contrast to similar cases elsewhere in the world, I argue that this form of popular politics on the BRVM is far more than an instrument for the accumulation strategies of financial elites: it is a new and distinct style of political engagement in which petits porteurs are, in the name of the West African ‘people’, coupling together anti-elite and anti-colonial critiques with a set of familiar market devices. I characterize this political engagement as popular shareholding.