The articles that appear in this part issue focus on disparate topics, from rumours of electoral fraud to the production of art, and span the African continent from Guinea and Ghana in the west to Zimbabwe in the south. Despite their evident differences, the contributors see their pieces as united by a common theme: emergence. Elaborating on Simone's influential exploration of the intertwined concepts of emergence and emergency (2004), as well as prior research in Africa on informal economic practices (the exchange of goods and services unregulated by states) (Hart 1973; Piot 2010; Roitman 2004; Weiss 2009), we consider emergence to be the process by which new social formations become thinkable, repeatable, and even – at times – habitual. Although conditions of crisis or precarity or even revolutionary upheaval might be fertile ground for emergence, insofar as these social conditions represent ‘rupture[s] in the organization of the present’ (Simone 2004: 4), the articles here also show that new social practices do not emerge out of nowhere. Rather, these articles demonstrate that attention to quotidian encounters can illuminate how citizens mobilize previously existing norms and patterns of behaviour in response to social change or economic crisis.

Fire outbreaks are common sources of anxiety and insecurity in informal settlements, but they can also provide new opportunities for claim making and governance of urban space. This article examines how a series of four fires in Accra, Ghana – three of which took place in its largest squatter settlement – offered new opportunities to experiment with governance, or a new way for residents and leaders to imagine and construct the future. Empirically, I document how, in the process of reconstruction, residents redrew property lines and reshaped social relations. They did this through the emergent political action I call building permanence, or a physical claim to the urban space one inhabits, as well as a new existential state of being and living in environs that will last and remain unharmed. The article offers a possible way towards achieving more secure tenure beyond formalization and infrastructure upgrades, and focuses attention on how institutions change in the context of daily life after a moment of crisis.

This article examines conspiracy theory as an integral part of political practice. In 2010, following a tumultuous year that included a military takeover and a junta-led massacre of civilians, the Republic of Guinea held what was widely considered to be the country's first democratic presidential election since independence in 1958. During this time, many Guineans regularly exchanged information about secret intrigues at the highest levels of politics. These popular reports of powerful figures conspiring to fix the election influenced people's talk and actions, contributing to an environment in which abstract suspicions crystallized in real, and sometimes violent, events. These events in turn heightened suspicions of high-level conspiracy and, among people who identified as ethnic Fulɓe, reinforced the widespread conviction that they were being targeted. Focusing ethnographically on two episodes in which theories of conspiracy influenced how Guineans perceived and shaped the course of the 2010 elections, this article explores conspiracy theorizing as an emergent mode of politics that may have profound effects.

This article is an ethnographic investigation of the labours of making art and selling liquid petroleum gas (LPG) in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. It locates these activities within a shared social world, centred on one of Bulawayo's major art galleries, and it demonstrates that artists and LPG dealers use similar strategies to respond to the political conditions of life in the city. This article frames these conditions as unpredictable, insofar as they change frequently and crystallize in unexpected forms, and it argues that both groups are attempting to act within these conditions and shape them into emergent assemblages. In adopting this term ‘assemblage’, which has been elaborated theoretically by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their many interlocutors, this article emphasizes both the mutability and the unpredictability of these formations. The artists who work in the gallery, for their part, make their art by assembling their chosen media. The processes by which they choose their media constitute assemblages as well, in that artists have to adapt their artistic visions to the materials that Zimbabwe's market can provide. Street dealers in gas also produce emergent assemblages against the backdrop of unpredictability. If they want to make natural gas available to consumers, dealers must shepherd their medium through an always emergent process of distribution. They participate in transnational networks of trade, but they also theorize innovative strategies of procurement, develop circuits of trust and loyalty, and conjure up visions of a predatory state. Like artists, they use their work to construct dynamic representations of the world around them. Artists may produce images, and dealers circulate gas, but this article shows that conceptualizing these practices in terms of ‘assemblages’ calls their commonalities into view. In doing so, it also demonstrates that these practices complicate easy distinctions between aesthetics, economics and politics.

What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's ‘edge city’ of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and struggles for urban survival converge. Here, day-to-day entanglements with city dwellers’ discarded items muddy the expected terms of economic dispossession and attainment. At Ashaiman's dump, the perils of social and bodily breakdown are matched by the promise of expanded reproduction via waste work, invigorating the economic prospects of the region's footloose underemployed. Relevant well beyond Ghana, such inversions point to an insistent underside of late-capitalist overproduction: namely, in this dense space of discard and decay, those on the lowest rungs of the urban economic ladder meld bodily expenditure, social aspiration and material breakdown to forge fragile futures and to format urban space. Blending materialisms new and old, a view from Ashaiman's dump bridges the insights of relational ontologies focused on the agency of things and labour-based renderings of capitalism's transformation.

This article is about two generations of women in south-western Chad – the baou déné and the mosso. It addresses the puzzle of how these groups of women are present in the everyday life of the region known as ‘useful’ Chad, while women as economic agents are absent from stories about the region and about successive schemes to make it profitable. The baou déné are wealthy farmers, but the last generation of these ‘women who have a lot of things’ is disappearing. Younger women are referred to as mosso, meaning ‘to fall down’. They are more likely to make a living from small trade than from farming and their lives are defined by precarity. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary sources, I show how the erasure of women happened in different ways over time. In the colonial era, administrators and travel writers were unable to imagine that women transformed forests into cotton fields. In this century, the idea that women farm just like men was disseminated by oil companies, facilitating land expropriation while drowning out stories of women's marginalization. The baou déné and the mosso are the products of specific historical processes and profit-making schemes, and the silences about women's places in them helped make profits, empire and ‘useful’ Chad possible.

A drinking party in 1963 precipitated a crisis over newly independent Uganda's sovereignty and the respectability of a new postcolonial ruling elite. Under Kampala's multiracial veneer in the early 1960s lurked bawdy British youth culture and radical African youth politics. When Europeans at a party in the elite suburb of Tank Hill allegedly mocked African aspirations for urban respectability and political sovereignty, UPC (Uganda Peoples Congress) Youth Wing activists used the affair to elicit public expressions of anger at the collusion of conservative politicians and racist former colonizers. Prime Minister Milton Obote attempted to channel that anger into nationalist unity but soon found common cause with British diplomats in expelling intemperate youth from Uganda's governing bureaucracy. The affair points to both the power and the limits of the affective politics of decolonization as well as the relationship between youth wings and the politics of respectability in early postcolonial Africa.

What drives the formation of ties and networks in ethnically hybrid spaces despite the occurrence of conflict? We approach this question by examining the actors involved, the institutions affected, and the economic and environmental contexts surrounding such tendencies. This study explores socially thick arrangements between Maasai and Kikuyu in Narok and their role in the non-violent use of formerly contested lands. In Laikipia, we examine how young Samburu and Kikuyu cooperate in a dangerous yet economically beneficial network involving cattle-rustling ventures. We revisit the history of land settlement in Kenya's Rift Valley, particularly in the study areas of Narok and Laikipia, and show how access and settlement rights to land are negotiated peacefully, encouraging ethnic assimilation and cooperative social and economic relations. Based on this context and the exploration of our case studies, we argue that the formation of alliances in multi-ethnic settings tends to override other identities when mutual benefits drive such associations.

The first period of agrarian reforms with clear state control over the land (African socialisms) took place between 1945 and 1980, but then a second period started in which market agrarian reforms have prevailed. This work synthesizes agrarian structural reform policies (property systems and land tenure) between 1980 and 2016 in African countries, especially those that had or have bureaucratic bourgeoisie governments (one-party and/or African socialist). The two periods are complementary, rather then being opposed to each other, as state agrarian reforms smoothed the path to market agrarian reforms. Although there is not yet sufficient empirical research on the results of the agrarian reforms implemented during this period, our hypothesis is that they are helping to: increase the unequal structure of property; develop tenure systems and non-capitalist contractual labour relations in new ways, both non-associative (the grabbing of vast tracts of land) and associative (renewed control of customary lands by traditional authorities); and force peasant expropriation and the subsequent increase in the number of landless non-proletarianized peasants. Therefore, the problem of poor agrarian structures in Africa is still unresolved.