The following articles are all authored by scholars who started out their research careers on African economies in the latter half of the 1990s. They had an unusual opportunity. The world they were studying posed new logistical challenges to researchers, while the realities they eventually came to know also challenged the theoretical co-ordinates with which they were familiar. Their work reflects these dilemmas; it represents a new engagement with the empirical situation and a corresponding new breadth of allusion to theory and to work from the past.

Focusing on the tri-juncture of Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso, this article examines the role of cross-border traders in the construction and redefinition of international boundaries. Through the study of the social and spatial patterning of trade surrounding three commodities–imported cloth, beans and shea butter (karite)—it explores the multiple ways the border is endowed with or deprived of significance. When the border is viewed as a socio-geographic region the importance of popular practice to the on-going constitution of state power and presence becomes evident.

Competition, success and secrecy are fundamental characteristics of the local food economy of Ibadan, Nigeria. With the growth of the processed cassava, or gari, trade throughout this area, these characteristics are revealed in a number of contexts in the food trade. Traders and shopkeepers circulate their wealth and plough profits back into a range of trading items to obscure their exact economic status from other traders and their families. Success in this context entails secrecy in a number of respects. In relation to buyers in the gari trade, secrecy entails the obfuscation of whether the trader deals retail or wholesale, what she is worth in terms of food stocks and her personal wealth. Successful traders also invest their earnings in social celebrations, in their children's education and in personal homes that all work to foster and enhance their social status and validate their wealth.

This article examines how diverse and contradictory representations of the sisal industry under the British Mandate and independent socialist Tanzania are shaping the process of privatisation. By setting present-day socio-economic realities in the long-term historical context of transformation it dispels some of the assumptions that underlie celebration of market forces and the private sector.

Historical writing on agrarian differentiation in rural Zimbabwe has moved away from conceptualising the peasantry as a homogeneous class, and has therefore enhanced our understanding of the process of rural differentiation. While such writing recognises patterns of differential land holding, however, it has not shown clearly how the differences developed over time. There has been a tendency to argue that land distribution in the ‘communal’ areas is less skewed than other variables and therefore acts as a brake on the process of accumulation and differentiation among the peasantry. The article challenges this basic assumption, arguing that ‘communal’ tenure actually facilitated the development of significant disparities in landholding and accumulation by rural households.