The excerpts below are from two of the sixteen chapters in B. S. Gadzekpo's radio memoir. In ‘Battles at the microphone’, Gadzekpo describes the diverse ways in which he and other Vernacular Announcers made their mark on wartime programming during World War Two, including how they carefully selected what could be aired as news and rallied local support for the war effort. The chapter ‘The music talent hunt’ details his tireless efforts at identifying and recording indigenous music to play on air in order to keep local audiences glued to the radio, especially after the war. The full text of the manuscript is available with the supplementary material published with Audrey Gadzekpo's article introducing this work at <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972021000012>.

Through narratives of an anti-‘fetish’ movement that swept through north-eastern Gabon in the mid-1950s, the present article traces the contours of converging political and religious imaginations in that country in the years preceding independence. Fang speakers in the region make explicit connections between the arrival of post-Second World War electoral politics, the anti-fetish movements, and perceptions of political weakening and marginalization of their region on the eve of independence. Rival politicians and the colonial administration played key roles in the movement, which brought in a Congolese ritual expert, Emane Boncoeur, and his two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and Mimbare. These spirits, later recuperated in a wide range of healing practices, continue to operate today throughout northern Gabon and Rio Muni. In local imaginaries, these spirits played central roles in the birth of both regional and national politics, paradoxically strengthening the colonial administration and Gabonese auxiliaries in an era of pre-independence liberalization. Thus, regional political events in the 1950s rehearsed later configurations of power, including presidential politics, on the national stage.

This article examines the works of one of the earliest Yoruba poets, Denrele Adetimikan Ọbasa (1879–1945), a member of the local intelligentsia in colonial Nigeria. In my assessment of the poet as a culture activist and local intellectual, I draw on biographical information, extensive archival research and relevant textual illustration. The central argument of the article is that Ọbasa exploits Yoruba communal oral resources for ideas, themes and other linguistic influences in his poetry. Therefore, the essay explores the creative ability of Ọbasa to preserve different forms of oral literary material in his poetic composition and how he uses the folkloric materials as instruments for raising the social consciousness of his readers. At this level, the article argues, Ọbasa transforms oral traditions into metaphorical and symbolic language that best articulates his political or philosophical positions. Thus, orality is not static, but dynamic, flexible and adaptable to change. The main article offers translations of excerpts from Ọbasa's poetry, while the online supplementary material offers more complete samples of Ọbasa's poems.

This article considers the uptake of Achille Mbembe’s article ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (1992), the book De la Postcolonie: essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporain (2000) and its translated version, On the Postcolony (2001), in Congo studies. ‘Congo’ here is a shorthand for the current Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. The article is concerned with the ways in which these two English-language texts (and their original French versions) figure in the social sciences and the humanities, specifically in the field of study relating to Zairian/Congolese society and culture. It becomes clear that the theme of mutual entanglements of commandement (power) and citizens not only influences political studies but also structures Congo scholarship on economy and governance, popular culture and erotics. The article ends with some reflections on academic writing about Congo, the limited uptake of ‘Provisional notes’ and On the Postcolony in religious studies, questions about ethics and scientific writing about political postcolonial cultures, and especially the necessity to historicize the postcolony.

This article analyses an episode of public anxiety when, in late 2013, word spread throughout Kenya’s rural Lunga Lunga constituency that politically connected gangs called mumiani were abducting and killing children for their eyes, tongues and genitals. The rapid spread of these rumours coincided with a regional drought, parliamentary election campaigns, and the apparent discovery of ‘devil worship paraphernalia’ inside a shipping container at the nearby port of Mombasa. I analyse the 2013 mumiani scare in relation to histories of famine survival strategies, predatory patronage and occult speculation to argue that the 2013 mumiani panic condensed and expressed these histories in figural rather than temporal form. As ‘constellations’ of coastal Kenyan historical consciousness, mumiani are (and have long been) a key feature of, and at the same time iconic of, a broader critical discourse about the dark side of political largesse – ‘politics by night’.

This article concerns the effects of globalization on Islam in the Bamum kingdom, Cameroon. Since its introduction into the kingdom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islam has been closely intertwined with ethnicity and the local political system has been consensual. Politically, Bamum royalty – as the secular arm of central power – has had the unconditional support of Islam. For a long period, ‘Bamum Islam’, with its origins in the Tijaniya tariqa, withdrew in on itself, unlike other parts of Africa where sufism is dominant. But since the start of the 1990s, both political liberalization and Isalmic modernity have had their effects in Bamum through what is called in Foumban the ‘Wahhabite’ infiltration, namely, all those who have studied in Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The politico-religious foundation on which were based both the legitimacy of the royal household and the unity of the Bamum people has been undermined and disabled, provoking a crisis of identity. This crisis is evidenced, on the one hand, by the politicization of the Tijaniya on behalf of one opposition party, reforms and the destabilization of the dominant position of the Tijaniya, and, on the other hand, by a Tijaniya insurrection, open defiance and the weakening of the position of the Sultan-King of Bamum.