Recent studies on Chinese investment in Africa have particularly focused on the hardware of development – infrastructure – and its impact. China's vision to forge a new global order was made explicit when Xi declared his ‘One Belt, One Road’ policy in 2013. Underlying the grand infrastructural schemes and political posturing are hidden financial manoeuvres, the soft side of power, unspoken sociality and value contestations. This article focuses on the variegated landscape of China–Africa trade/finance infrastructure centring on Hong Kong. It highlights top-down state orchestration but also explores historical contingencies that have shaped the strategies of those whose footprints unexpectedly straddle continental divides.

This article interrogates the introduction of special economic zones (SEZs) in Nigeria with an emphasis on the establishment of the Lekki free trade zone (FTZ) in May 2006 by the Lagos State government in partnership with a Chinese consortium, and of the Ogun-Guandong FTZ in Igbesa, Ogun State by the Ogun State government. The aim of the Lekki FTZ, Ogun-Guandong FTZ and other SEZs is to transform Lagos and Ogun states into the manufacturing hub of West Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. These economic zones in Nigeria encompass oil and gas, manufacturing, retail, real estate, and other ancillary companies. Based on interviews and participant observations, this article investigates how differing notions of land ownership circulate within communities affected by the FTZs. I ask how it is that indigenous populations, who fear displacement from their living spaces and socio-economic livelihoods, have begun to utilize claims to ancestral land ownership as symbolic expressions of cultural meanings and belonging that run counter to the property regimes associated with the FTZ project. How does the production of such cultural meanings intersect with the claims and counter-claims of indigeneity, communal ownership, and belonging to a space with a rich history that predates the postcolonial state and the inheritors of state power in Lagos? How is it that FTZs, framed as infrastructure projects designed to make life better for the people, end up displacing populations? In drawing out the connections between large-scale development and displacement, this article examines how communities employ both the tangible and intangible past to show how contestations over land ownership are reshaping new forms of community history and culture.

The Kenyan government's long-term development strategy, Vision 2030, has emphasized infrastructural investments, which it believes will lead to sustained economic growth. The government has appealed to China to fund large-scale projects in the transport sector, and as a consequence of this, construction firms from China have emerged as significant employers in the country. While the Kenyan government contends with the ongoing burden of youth unemployment, it must also reconcile the ambiguities of China's role in Africa and its implications for the labour market. This article examines two Chinese-built infrastructure projects in Kenya and their intersection with several issues involving migrant labour and local rumours of Chinese prisoners, as well as the state's vision for industrialization and youth employment. Kenyans utilize both online and interpersonal channels of discourse to critique present-day employment practices in the transport sector, and it is argued that these counter-channels of discourse represent a particular articulation of knowledge used by Kenyans to construct meaning and interpret ambiguous situations. Through a theoretical analysis of rumour, this article illustrates how ordinary Kenyans are pooling their intellectual resources to understand Sino-Kenyan labour relations in the absence of transparency and participatory government processes in the infrastructure sector.

In 1964, the newly established Hong Kong-based Cha Group partnered with the Northern Nigerian Regional Development Corporation to open the United Nigerian Textiles Limited (UNTL) mill in Kaduna – the largest textile mill in Northern Nigeria. The Cha Group later expanded, building textile mills in other parts of the country. Both Chinese and Nigerian managers and workers were involved in UNTL mills, which by 1980 provided printed cotton textiles for the Nigerian market and for other markets in West Africa. Yet this Chinese–Nigeria collaboration could not overcome factors external to the textile-manufacturing industry. Declining infrastructure, erratic electricity, frequent changes in political leadership at the federal level, and the smuggling of less-costly imported textiles (often from China) undermined local textile manufacturing, while inflationary pressures associated with the national oil industry undermined agricultural production, exacerbating the difficulties of obtaining raw Nigerian cotton. In 2007, the UNTL mill in Kaduna closed, although it resumed production in December 2010, assisted by the 100 billion naira Cotton, Textile and Garment Development Fund. Cha Group officials also used their knowledge of the Nigerian textile market as the basis for the marketing of branded, high-quality manufactured textiles, known as Da Viva®, at company-franchised shops in major Nigerian cities. The Cha Group took advantage of digital innovation, both in the printing of these popular textiles and also by advertising them on an attractive website. This article considers the ways in which the United Nigerian Textiles Plc company has maintained production of grey cloth and printed textiles at its mills in Kaduna and Ikorodu-Lagos, along with the marketing of Da Viva® cotton prints, which suggests the continuing, if contradictory, possibilities for this Nigerian–Chinese textile-manufacturing collaboration.

In Conakry, the capital city of the Republic of Guinea, dance ceremonies called sabars, derived from a Senegalese genre of the same name, have become extremely popular for wedding celebrations. Sabar's rise in Guinea coincided with the liberalization of the country's economy and the opening of national borders in the wake of state socialism (1958–84) – events that have produced profound uncertainty for average citizens. This article explores sabar as a practice that grapples affectively with the social and economic changes neoliberal reform has engendered within Guinea. Sabar ceremonies are characterized by instantiations of excess, including hypersexualized dancing, electric amplification and theatrical displays of opulence. By examining excess as an ‘emergent’ quality whose cultural value is undetermined, the article demonstrates how dancers participate in the active constitution and questioning of collective value in Conakry, and how embodiment is central to an anthropology of precarity.

Recent infrastructural developments in Senegal have severely impacted on the livelihoods of female bana-banas from Mali, a group of mobile traders operating in the Mali–Dakar corridor: transportation costs have significantly increased, travelling has become a more exhausting experience, and fatal accidents have become more frequent during journeys. Why did the bana-banas continue these arduous journeys? Why was their physical presence required in Dakar, and why did they not rely more extensively on social networks to facilitate their transnational trade? This article examines the conditions of autonomy, flexibility and limited trust that characterized the bana-banas’ livelihoods and necessitated their continued mobility from Mali. The recent infrastructural transformations have led to an increased commercialization and disarticulation of Malian trade networks in the Senegalese capital, and, due to personal circumstances, the women have often been cut off from networks. However, unlike general expectations of the ways in which networks evolve under conditions of neoliberalism, the bana-banas have not turned to personalized relationships of trust in Dakar, which might have facilitated their trade from a distance. The article contributes to the growing literature on social networks and trust by exploring how transnational trade does and does not work at this historical moment and in the context of gendered constraints.