Extensively ignored by the literature on the subject, recent interest in the fate of academic freedom in Africa is linked with shared concerns about the exploding nature of its societal crises. The collapse of political integration and social cohesion; the decline of the civil society and the implosion of conflicts; the rise of authoritarian, non-developmental populist regimes amid extreme poverty; and the worsening material conditions of the populations are major indications of such crises. Nowhere are these crises worse illustrated than in the universities where constrained funding, infrastructural collapse, massive brain drains and strained relations with the state inhibit the production of knowledge. This article reflects on the trajectory of the universities in postcolonial Africa. It draws on the national public universities in Nigeria and accounts for the changes and continuities underlying their performance against the backdrop of hostile material conditions and uncongenial political control, which not only remain disruptive but continue to undermine institutional autonomy and the integrity of scholarship in the universities across Africa.

Most existing literature on the causes of party switching both in Africa and around the world is built on tenuous empirical foundations. The question of why members of parliament (MPs) switch parties has hardly been asked directly either to the MPs themselves or to everyday voters. While MPs could lie or give more favourable accounts that suit their interests, putting this question to them could uncover other crucial factors that have fallen through the cracks in previous theorizations. This article takes a triangulation approach by drawing from the viewpoints of researchers, voters and MPs themselves to give a more holistic picture of the drivers of party defection. Through a combination of a nationwide representative survey and elite and key informant interviews, I situate the trend of party switching in Nigeria within broader comparative literature on the subject, showing how Nigeria conforms and deviates from existing conceptualizations of party switching around the world. I find evidence of interactions between formal and personal drivers of party switching in Nigeria. I also discover that while a majority of Nigerian voters are suspicious of defectors, defectors point accusing fingers at the lack of internal democracy within political parties, thereby exposing an issue not adequately addressed in existing literature.

Countering the focus on crisis and irregularity that frames dominant representations of African migration to Europe, this article explores Gambian migrant women’s journeys of return. It is argued that Gambian women returnees’ financial resources, levels of education, kinship relations and social networks have positioned them in such a way that they can benefit from the opportunities and possibilities in The Gambia, thereby influencing their decisions to return. Significantly, their positions have helped them to negotiate and, in some instances, challenge gendered expectations and relations in their experiences on return. Further, the exchange of knowledge and their transnational networks and connections place the global South and the global North as co-constitutive elements in the development of their work and their gendered subjectivities. As such, I focus on the analytical purchase that the concept of return affords, as well as its political possibilities. The article contributes to existing scholarship on migration by highlighting the importance of returnees’ multiple subjectivities in both their decisions to return and their experiences on return. In addition, I foreground the contributions that returnees make to the places to which they have migrated, thereby challenging representations of African migrants as deficient and of Africa as a place of absence.

Following a severe drought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the invasive shrub Prosopis, a kind of mesquite native to South America, was introduced by international organizations to locations across Kenya’s drylands, including the Turkana region in the far north. Prosopis, known as etirae in Turkana, was envisaged as a solution to a range of problems, including deforestation, fuelwood shortages and general environmental deterioration. While exacerbated by drought, these problems were perceived to reflect a much more fundamental crisis, with prevalent views at the time envisaging pastoralism as unsustainable, destructive and in need of overhaul – a narrative dating to colonial times that has since been discredited. Since its introduction, etirae has spread relentlessly, invading riparian land, encroaching on cultivation plots and growing to new heights and thicknesses. Investigating its entanglements with Turkana livelihoods and economic relationships is also a process of understanding how it has braided its way through contested processes of social change, and how it has come to be intertwined with conceptions of cascading crisis quite distinct from the narratives that led to its initial introduction. Implications emerge regarding both the complicated biological residues of past development interventions and the totalizing crisis-oriented narratives that shape drylands development in the current era of climate change.

This article argues that, despite techno-utopian narratives of digital self-directed learning (through content freely available on the internet) and its proposed opportunities for upward social mobility, digital learning is and remains a highly contextual practice, rooted in local realities and aspirational trajectories. Through learning with a community-based organization (CBO) that offers tech training to youth from low-income neighbourhoods in Kibera, Nairobi, I argue that digital learning does not replace formal education but rather is strategically incorporated into already existing learning practices. Although Nairobi has been extensively studied as a frontrunner in technology uptake and development in Africa, it is crucial to also look at technology practices and uptake away from elite design and use, to extend and deepen our knowledge of how the digital realm plays out in the lives of the majority of urban residents.