A wealth of new writing has emerged around the future of labour, focusing on thinking beyond employment in imagining the futures of ‘surplus populations’ no longer needed by labour markets. These new imaginaries include radically expanded forms of redistribution, such as unconditional cash transfers or universal basic income. But what are the views of the ‘surplus populations’ themselves? This article uses ethnographic research in an informal settlement in South Africa to understand why the unemployed or precariously employed poor are themselves often reluctant to delink labour and income. In particular, we focus on the discursive use of ‘laziness’ by urban unemployed young men. The varied (and often contradictory) ways in which these men employ the laziness discourse sheds light on the logics linking waged work and money in our informants’ social imaginaries. It illuminates the underlying contradictions and complexities of such logics, including those of gender, relational obligations, expectations of citizenship, and the inevitable tensions between aspirational hopes and economic realities. To begin thinking ‘beyond the proper job’, to use Ferguson and Li's phrase, we must unravel and understand such nuanced logics that continue to bind together hard work, deservingness and cash – even for those left out of labour markets.

In the trading centre of Atine Atirir in eastern Uganda, young men gather to play ludo. They are educated but most do not have salaried employment. Many farm and do some form of casual labour. They talk about the importance of leisure and ‘leisure time’ and discuss the prospects of Arsenal in the English Premier League. In this article I explore the relationship between education, farming and ‘leisure time’ and look at the ways in which young men in particular make sense of lives that involve both schooling and farming. A number of scholars have focused on the tensions and frustrations of educated – typically urban – youth in Africa and elsewhere. They observe a growing distance between older and younger people, and the ways young men define their situation as one of boredom, dissatisfaction and waiting. By contrast, I show the ways in which the ludo board helped younger men in a poorer, rural setting elide an interest in an ‘educated style’ with rural forms of work – farming, petty trading and casual employment – and how the space around the game was mostly a site of play and relaxation, a place for passing, rather than killing, time. There was also a large degree of sympathy between the generations.

This article describes how residents and staff of an eldercare and Alzheimer's home in a small South African town joke with each other. Residents are mostly white and staff mostly black, but there are exceptions, and both groups are multilingual. Jokes between the two groups in the home are racialized, if not sometimes racist, in light of historical and contemporary post-apartheid socio-political and economic circumstances. Yet the relations between these two groups are forged mostly in joking about residents’ diminished cognitive and bodily abilities, staff work, multilingualism and interpersonal ties. In describing joking encounters in three ethnographic scenes, the article traces the ways in which age and race combine in institutionalized relationships of dependency to innovate social theory about human mutuality from the vantage point of multiracial, multicultural, postcolonial Africa.

The history of South Africa's urban-based ‘struggle lawyers’ – a trajectory epitomized by Nelson Mandela – is much discussed by historians and biographers, reflecting a broader vein of historiography that celebrates anti-colonial legal activism. However, it was South Africa's ‘Native Reserves’ and Bantustans that produced the majority of African lawyers for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, two-thirds of the African justices who have sat on the post-apartheid Constitutional Court either practised or trained in the Bantustans during the apartheid era. The purpose of this article is thus to reappraise South Africa's ‘legal field’ – the complex relationship between professional formation, elite reproduction and the exercise of political power – by tracing the ambiguous role played by the Native Reserves/Bantustans in shaping the African legal profession across the twentieth century. How did African lawyers, persistently marginalized by century-long patterns of exclusion, nevertheless construct an elite profession within the confines of segregation and apartheid? How might we link the histories of the Bantustans with the better-known ‘struggle historiography’ that emphasizes the role of political and legal activism in the cities? And what are the implications of South Africa's segregated history for debates about the ‘decolonization’ of the legal profession in the post-apartheid era?

This article examines two closely related themes: the triangle of tradition, capital and the state; and resistance to neotraditional leadership and local activism for democracy. I investigate an uprising in the Topnaar Traditional Authority in the Erongo region of Namibia by young community activists who aimed to promote democracy in their community in a context of manifold accusations of self-enrichment and corruption against the neotraditional leadership. The article demonstrates that the corporatization of tradition is a double-edged sword: neotraditional leaders expand their local power towards their subjects in the short term, but it often produces severe conflict that may result in the delegitimization of neotraditional authority in the long run. However, the Topnaar youth uprising and quest for democracy was less about challenging neotraditional authority per se and more about replacing the incumbents as well as obtaining a fair share of political power. It resulted from the perception that the neotraditional-cum-corporate ventures no longer served the cause of a common good; this, in turn, contradicted the general ideal of equality among the Topnaar. The corporatization of tradition thus generated local grievances and stimulated demands for democratic participation. Since the uprising gained at least some of its momentum from my research on neotraditional authority, I also reflect on my role.

Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture and rural village economies. Rural communities, while small in scale, are creating new ways to transform their degraded environment. Their small size allows them to develop location-specific strategies to manage and improve water, soil and agriculture. This article focuses on two Sufi communities (daaras) in Senegal that integrate environmental work and spirituality. Religious organizations are influential in Senegal, as is the idea that labour is a part of both personal spirituality and shared religious teachings. As agriculture continues to be disrupted because of climate fluctuations, creating a habitable environment relies on applying region-specific agricultural science, and working through local structures. These conceptions of labour, along with the religious structures that support their work, make environmental projects spiritually significant, and also transformative for agriculture in a challenging environment.

This article discusses the workings of civil society and its leaders in Niger. Tracing the country's historically sedimented socio-political order, it argues that Niger's civil society is characterized by a twofold embeddedness. Since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, the political game in Niger has been exemplified by co-optation, bribery and corruption. These spoils are a central focus for civil society leaders who have become experienced in the political game. Indeed, actors’ social embeddedness in networks of solidarity demands that they capture and redistribute the spoils they receive. At the same time, however, their social and political legitimacy as civil society leaders rests on their ability to avoid becoming entangled in the game, and to avoid accusations of ‘playing politics’. In other words, civil society activists are embedded in the same social and political structures as state bureaucrats and politicians. In this context, civil society activists cannot maintain the moral high ground they often claim to occupy.

Èṣù of the Yorùbá tradition, the custodian of the primordial àṣẹ, embodies the principle of perspicacity and pragmatism that is crucial for the exercise of responsibility by sentient and thinking beings. As such, Èṣù demands the ultimate in consciousness as a basis for just living and for a just measure of reward or sanction. Èṣù calls for painstaking commitment to rigorously distilled information and keen consciousness as preconditions for action of any sort, especially for the exercise of judgement, a compelling gesture of the human will. Scholarly and/or zealous traditions have, however, persistently alienated Èṣù from his native Yorùbá cosmology. This article argues for a need for rehabilitation.