In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

The coming of the mobile phone camera has transformed photography. This article explores this transformation through a case study of photography in Eastleigh, a Nairobi estate that is home to many thousand Somalis, both Kenyan Somalis and refugees from Somalia. It is a trade hub for East Africa, a social and economic hub for the global Somali diaspora, and a place regarded as suspect in a country where Somalis have long been marginalized. This article examines Eastleigh as photographic subject and setting, comparing the ubiquity of mobile phone photography there with seldom-practised more traditional forms of photography that are often treated with suspicion in an estate subject to securitized government policy and negative press. It shows how mobile phone photography helps people in the estate communicate visually with the wider Somali diaspora through social media, and how it helps people sell their goods, using as a case study a particular archive of images sent through WhatsApp to the author by Mohaa, a friend of his and a trader in the estate. The article also adds a political dimension to recent anthropological theorizing on mobile photography, showing how, in Eastleigh, Somalis have used photography and social media to take control of the way in which the estate is represented visually, and to demand from the state better services and better treatment.

Since 2012, the influx of affordable smartphones to urban Nigeria has revolutionized how young people take, store and circulate photographs. Crucially, this ever-expanding digital archive provides urban youth with a means to communicate new ideas of self, allowing a marginalized group to display fortunes that often belie their difficult realities. Through gestures and poses, fashion and style, the companionship of others, or the use of particular backdrops and locations, these photographs contain certain semiotics that allude to the subject owning the means for success in urban Nigeria. Similarly, as youth constantly store photographs of themselves on their handsets alongside those of celebrities, patrons and friends, coveted commodities and aspirational memes, they construct personal narratives that place them at the centre of global flows and networks. With the ability to constantly retake, update and propagate photographs, the discrepancies between in- and off-frame identities become ambiguous. This article explores how young people in Calabar, south-eastern Nigeria, use digital photographs on their mobile phones to cultivate new visions of themselves. Arguing that these photographs not only represent superlative aspirations but are also integral to social becoming, the discussion examines how digital images allow youth to reposition themselves within (and beyond) Nigerian society. Ephemerality is central: digital photographs can be easily circulated and retain some permanence on social media, yet these immaterial objects can easily be lost from handsets. In thinking about the futures of African youth and African photography, this article therefore interrogates the tensions of private and public archives.

On 16 July 2013, Simone Schlindwein, a German journalist, used her mobile phone to photograph a conflict-related image in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that later contributed to local riots and to her hasty exit across the border. From the ‘front’, she uploaded the photograph to her Twitter account and caused a melee of virtual and on-the-ground controversy that at record speed came to involve the United Nations, members of the Congolese diaspora, the Congolese army, the M23 rebel army propaganda office, and the residents of the region. This article starts from her image to ethnographically examine the resulting events and responses, both online and in the city of Goma. In so doing, it engages the heated regional debate as to whether the image was objectively captured or if the violence depicted was simply ‘playing for the camera’. Addressing the simultaneous online movement of the image through social media and news sites, the article argues that the combination of the socio-political climate, conflict and the uncontrollable narrative of the image created a perfect storm in which the entangled regional politics suddenly became visible.

The last decade has witnessed the ubiquitous presence of camera devices, from conventional cameras to communication gadgets (such as mobile phones, iPads and tablets), built with the capacity to produce, edit, disseminate and interact through photographs. In this article, I analyse visual materials circulated on Facebook, YouTube and Nairaland (a locally popular social-networking website used by Nigerians) to demonstrate how the ubiquity of the camera, its overt and surreptitious use, and the transformation and circulation of the resulting photographs constitute political acts in a postcolonial African context. The camera's ubiquity encompasses the increasing availability of photographic devices, but also the growing, and politically charged, inclination to put them to use, framing the world through which their users move. The production and dissemination of the resulting photograph gives it the status of an eyewitness account, amidst contestations that heighten its force as political articulation. Lastly, the ubiquitous camera is a means through which the public observes, polices and exposes the duplicity of state functionaries. The article contributes to an understanding of the ways in which digital infrastructure allows public access to the political undertaking of photography.

This article contributes to recent scholarship on an emergent public political visual culture in Africa. Through an ethnographic study of political billboards and other government-sponsored public political imagery in Uganda, it argues that this new visual culture is primarily characterized by African states’ extensive use of post-photographic techniques as a means for projecting fantastic visions of their future development goals. However, drawing on recent insights from the ‘material turn’ in visual theory, it finds that – in Uganda's case at least – the potency of these new public visual artefacts may stem less from what they show than from how they invoke in their citizen-viewers an embodied sense of future possibilities. Once generated, this affective response can be mobilized by the state and its agents in the ‘here and now’, for political gain. The article looks at how this worked in the run-up to Uganda's 2016 presidential elections, when, in the context of major new spending on national infrastructure projects, the images and artefacts of this new visual culture served to greatly amplify the sense that all citizens would benefit from an emergent global capitalism. This inflated aspiration was mobilized in turn by the National Resistance Movement government as an integral part of its election campaign, and played a key role in returning the government to power.

Drawn from East, West, Central and Southern Africa, the case studies in this special issue build on several decades of important work on photography in Africa. That work has examined colonial photography and postcards, studio work from colonial times to the present, activist photography, photojournalism, and artists who work with photographic images. It has addressed issues of representation, portraiture, aesthetics, self-fashioning, identities, power and status, modernities and materiality, the roles of photographs in governance and everyday politics, and the many histories and modes of social practice around making, showing, viewing, exchanging, manipulating, reproducing, circulating and archiving photographic images. Yet these articles push such issues and topics in exciting directions by addressing new photographic circumstances emerging throughout the world, initiated through new media's technological shifts and possibilities. In Africa, this has fuelled a range of transformations over the last fifteen years or so, transformations that are still unfolding. As the articles show, digital images, mobile phone cameras and social media (also accessed via phone) constitute the potent triad that has set off these transformations.

The formalization of ‘informal’ customary land rights is at the core of current rural land policies in Africa. The dubious impacts of such policies on agricultural production, and the recomposition of land rights and governance they cause, have been studied widely. But their territorial dimensions are hardly acknowledged. Studying the implementation of a rural land rights formalization project in central Benin, this article highlights the links between territorialization and plot-level land rights formalization. It first unpacks the notion of the village and presents a conceptual framework for analysing the superimposition of and contradiction between customary and administrative territories. Using two case studies, it then examines the conflicts that arise during formalization operations and their outcomes in terms of the mapping of land rights and political and administrative change. This article shows how the political organization of the territory and the socio-spatial inequalities resulting from the history of settlement shape the results of plot-level land rights registration (which explains why large parts of village territories have not been registered), and, in turn, how these registration operations lead to new territorialization processes and increase the heterogeneity of land tenure rights within the territory.

Within amateur musical circles in Benin, one is told that if a male blows too hard into a brass instrument his testicles might swell up, fall off, or even run away. Concerned parents warn their children against ‘blowing’ brass instruments, telling stories of inguinal hernias and infertility, and many maintain that male brass players must take preventative measures. Accompanying this unease about blowing out is a complementary concern with breathing in, and the possible inhalation of micro-organisms or poison through the mouth. Engaging with this anxiety of blowing, this article takes seriously my interlocutors’ concern with the consequences of playing brass instruments on their bodies. My main argument is that understandings of the precarious nature of breath are at the core of musicians’ experiences of anxiety. My exploration of the relation between breath, anxiety and the body supports a common phenomenology of breathing across cultures, and serves to advance breath as an important site of meaning making.

Congolese commerçantes, or transnational women traders, travel abroad to cities such as Guangzhou in search of affordable products to import to Kinshasa. Without any support from local banks, women must search for the means to finance their trips and navigate a complex bureaucracy governed by unpredictable customs tariffs. Just as men rely on their social networks to ensure the success of their business activities, women traders must also forge relationships with people in positions of power. However, a woman's social network, linked to her business activities, invites assumptions about her sexual morality. Men working within the country's unstable economic landscape are celebrated for their ingenuity and ability to ‘work the system’, while a woman's sexual morality is perceived as being affected by, and bound up in, Kinshasa's corrupt business matrices. Transnational commerçantes are thus not only an important part of the economic milieu, largely governed by patron–client relationships; but are also representative of changing gender dynamics in Kinshasa. Based on multi-site fieldwork in Kinshasa and Guangzhou, this article explores the moral anxieties associated with women's transnational trade, anxieties that relate to broader issues about the politics of social networks within local bureaucratic infrastructures.