Thanks to oil revenues, since the end of the war in 2002, Angola has largely eschewed the usual donor conditionalities in its state-led reconstruction process; the 2014 oil price drop, however, revealed the limits of this economic miracle. Coupled with a long-overdue political transition inside the ruling party, this moment of designated crisis has opened up spaces for elites to inject their continued projects of accumulation with the moralizing language of neoliberalism – talk of efficiency, responsibility, and the proverbial tightening of the belt. Based on fieldwork around the recently modernized transport hub of Lobito, the article examines how these tropes have been deployed and adapted, first to position Angola as a ‘business-friendly’ environment, and then to justify largely self-inflicted austerity measures. By examining the everyday working of real existing neoliberalism through the eyes of the port’s users, the article suggests that Angola’s turbulent history provides a fertile ground to advance, in this moment of crisis, agendas of capital capture, cloaking them in the mantle of common-sensical reasonableness and national solidarity.

Neoliberal ideologies have not only transformed the Namibian economy but also reconfigured some of the most intimate domains of everyday life. In the course of the last forty years, marriage in Namibia has changed from a widespread and affordable life transition to a costly celebration of middle-classness. To be married today is a sign of middle-class achievement, lifestyle and prosperity. The downside of these accomplishments is the middle classes’ fear of failing, especially through divorce. Although Namibian divorce rates are low, most middle-class couples interviewed in 2015–16 in Windhoek were anxious about such an end to marriage. In order to prevent divorce and the loss of a middle-class lifestyle, middle-class couples neoliberalized their marriages. With often cruel determination, many worked as hard as they could to optimize themselves, their marriages and their kin relations. They trimmed their bodies, enhanced their communications skills and supported their kin. As it remained unclear, however, how much optimizing would indeed be enough, their attempts at self-formation had a Sisyphus-like quality. This article builds on the growing literature on the lived experiences of the African middle classes, focusing on how the neoliberalization of Namibian marriages is shaping a new ethics of personhood.

In 2010, Kenya introduced a gender quota to boost women’s political representation. The quota mandated that a single gender should not hold more than two-thirds of elective and appointive positions in public bodies. When few women won seats in elections in 2013 and 2017, political parties fulfilled the gender quota by nominating hundreds of women as members of county assemblies (MCAs). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2019 in one of Kenya’s county assemblies, this article shows how nominated female MCAs participate in transactional relationships with the public. Like male politicians, they are often called on to contribute to fundraisers and to meet the needs of constituents. Female politicians also accompany their giving with political rhetoric in support of female leadership. I argue that, through their giving, female politicians use money as a tool to champion women’s political leadership. Their matronage – a term I use in lieu of patronage to emphasize the role of women in transactional relationships – ultimately shows how gender quota legislation can go only so far in increasing women’s political representation. Instead, political actors also rely on informal mechanisms in order to achieve gender equality in politics.

This article explores the conceptual and practical meanings of fahafahana (‘freedom’ in Malagasy) in the Highlands of Madagascar, a context where the legacies of past forms of slavery have left deep marks both in local memories and in social and economic hierarchies. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific notions of freedom have been elaborated against the background of the local history of slavery and emancipation; how these concepts have been charged with different meanings in different periods of Malagasy history, becoming an arena for the elaboration of different political agendas; and how people of different status, class, gender and age reframe the concept of freedom in their everyday lives. Local notions of freedom emerge as part of the local political commentaries through which power positions are accepted, renegotiated or contested, and they intersect deeply with local notions of honour and respectability. The idea that freedom is somehow related to issues of genealogical purity and to the ability to maintain and improve the wealth and dignity of the family continues to characterize local understandings and representations of this notion, signalling that the legacies of what it meant to be ‘free’ when slavery was still a legal institution still inform and shape current power structures and local social commentaries.

This article examines how the schools of the Ibadi-Omani diaspora have had an impact on religious education and Afro-Arab relations in post-revolutionary Zanzibar. Much of the existing literature about Ibadism and the Omani diaspora in Zanzibar centres on the island’s economic history, stories of Arab elites under sultanate rule and the politics of the 1964 revolution. Little work explores how Ibadis in Zanzibar today distinguish themselves from other Muslims by marrying within the Omani community, running religious charities, wearing Omani clothing, attending Ibadi mosques, and enrolling their children in Ibadi schools. This research offers a fresh perspective on Ibadism and Oman–Zanzibar relations under neoliberalism through an examination of the lived experiences of Ibadis and non-Ibadis affiliated with the schools of the Istiqama Muslim community and organization.

The aim of this article is to initiate a new debate on vigilantism in Nigeria by arguing for a re-examination of the links between crime and vigilantism. It contends that, although the existing literature has shed considerable light on the practice of vigilantism in Nigeria, it has also obscured entire dimensions of the problem. By focusing exclusively on vigilante groups or ethnic militias, scholars have failed to anticipate the shift of the bulk of the violence from these social agencies to spontaneous mobs. After highlighting the factors that help explain the marginalization of ‘mob’ vigilantism in the scholarship about Nigerian vigilantism, I use ethnographic materials from my own field research in Lagos to show how crime – or more precisely unexplained crime – fuels intra-community distrust, which in turn fuels vigilante mobilization and violence as it increases the social control that crime-beset communities apply to some of their members who resent such distrust and consider it unfair. The data presented provide fresh insights into one of the most intriguing features of Nigeria vigilantism: the involvement of social delinquents at the roots of urban insecurity.