Africanist discourse today displays a strong, widespread and growing sense of optimism about Africa's economic future. After decades of decline and stagnation in which Africa found itself reduced to the margins of the global economic stage, upbeat Afro-optimism seems fully justified. One only needs to consider African economies' solid growth rates, the emergence of new export markets earning unprecedented quantities of foreign exchange, and the rise of novel groups such as innovative African entrepreneurs (Taylor 2012) and urban-based middle classes (Simone 2004). Ironically, Africa's bright future stands in strong contrast to the stagnancy of European and American economic powers, once seen as superior to their African relatives. Deeply held feelings of Afro-pessimism, affecting intellectuals as well as ordinary Africans, are thus giving way to almost millennial expectations of Africa's economic future: the continent's imminent catching up with a degree of private and public prosperity so commonly registered elsewhere on the globe. Some go as far as to declare the rise of a proper African renaissance wherein Africa can (finally!) claim its rightful position on the global stage.

Savings groups are an important feature of life in rural Uganda and elsewhere. They have been celebrated as an ‘alternative’, community-based approach to economic development with a particular focus on empowering women. In this article we offer a more critical perspective, showing how a savings group in a village in eastern Uganda informs more general experiences of financialization. Joining the group was not really an ‘alternative’ to other forms of finance and was often a first step to securing loans from moneylenders, microfinance institutions and commercial banks. We show how poorer members of the group, typically women, ‘rented out’ their membership to wealthier villagers. Members also used the Friday meetings to socialize and to build political careers, and to reflect critically on experiences of financialization. ‘Money looks for money’, a phrase new to the area, interrogates these socialities and inequalities, as part of the seemingly inexorable pull of loans, interest and financialized debt.

This article focuses on the impact of the policies of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government on Zimbabwe's black middle class. It does so by exploring three propositions emerging from the academic literature. The first is that during the early years of independence, the middle class transformed into a party-aligned bourgeoisie. The second is that, to the extent that the middle class has not left the country as a result of the economic plunge from the 1990s, it played a formative role in opposition to ZANU-PF and the political elite. The third is that, in the face of ZANU-PF's authoritarianism and economic hardship, the middle class has largely withdrawn from the political arena.

This article argues for the importance of ‘literary materialism’ in colonial African understandings of respectability. It draws attention to a particular form of acquisitiveness that placed value on the materiality of literary things. That is, literary objects – books, journals, magazines, notebooks, diaries and encyclopaedia volumes – were valued for their material and physical qualities as well as for their use in imparting ‘knowledge’. They had the capacity, in Bourdieu's terms, to display cultural capital. My focus is Akinpelu Obisesan, a voluminous diarist whose life spanned the entire colonial period in the Yoruba city of Ibadan. The article first re-examines Obisesan's early years of diary writing, particularly how the activity related to his professional identity as a clerk, and then goes on to reconstruct the fraught circumstances that surrounded his purchase of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1928 and 1931. Obisesan struggled to pay his debt for the encyclopaedia, and all the time used his diary to confess his dire financial state. Ultimately, his claim to the cultural capital that the encyclopaedia embodied was undermined by his lack of economic resources.

Midwife Rokhaya Thiam joined the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi Islamic movement in 2005 and soon became aware of her divine mission to found the Association Mame Astou Diankha. This organization provides free medical services to needy people and organizes economic development projects for women. Rokhaya Thiam exemplifies a broader trend of ‘hybrid’ religious subjects in the Fayḍa Tijāniyya movement who embed neoliberal notions such as ‘development’ and individual entrepreneurial initiative into mystical notions of selfhood, agency and moral order. Such charismatic disciples seem to approach discipleship in liberal fashion, pursuing an individualized mission in contrast to the classic Sufi disciple who passively follows instructions from the shaykh. However, these disciples defy reduction to individual, neoliberal subjectivity, subsuming their agency under a larger spiritual entity responsible for revealing and realizing their mission. This article asks whether such hybridities may be intrinsic to neoliberal subjecthood, which entails being shaped by neoliberal power and knowledge while domesticating them to other ends, rather than being exceptions that emerge on the still-enchanted edges of neoliberalism.

In this issue, Jeremiah Arowosegbe makes a number of valid and important observations about the challenges facing the humanities and social sciences in Nigeria. But while he recognizes the importance of the political sphere by discussing the unequal and asymmetric landscape of global knowledge production, he locates most problems of knowledge production in Nigeria within the academy. Focusing on individual and generational responsibility and morality, Arowosegbe also suggests that recent generations of Nigerian academics have been ‘complacent and nonchalant’ in their engagement with global theoretical and methodological debates, and thus bear responsibility for the apparent decline of Nigerian academia.

Employing a theoretical framework developed by ecologist Paul Shepard, I explore here the ways in which Harari people's representations of spotted hyenas develop in tandem with their ontogenesis. The Harari word for hyena, waraba, takes on different meanings depending on the socialization of Harari individuals and the particular life stages of these persons. In early childhood, waraba is a terrifying beast of the imagination. As children mature, their initial conceptions are overturned as they learn that local hyenas are in fact peaceful; it is the hyenas from beyond Harar's borders whom they learn to fear. Throughout and beyond middle childhood, representations of hyenas are employed in folktales, songs, chants and idioms to represent other humans while at the same time reflecting an engagement with the local hyenas. The representations culminate in the conception of Derma Sheikh: the reliable, protective, religious hyena who shares the same interest in peace and security as the Hararis. In Harar, representations of hyenas reflect an attention to what hyenas do ‘out there’ in the streets and in the surrounding farmland. They speak of a level of engagement with hyenas as persons: one that is atypical of an ‘urbanized, industrialized’ society.

This article deals with the interrelationship of ethnic and national processes in a rural district in Wollega at the time of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. It describes how the state policy of ‘official nationalism’ and Amharisation on the one hand, and the policy of land confiscation and land grants on the other, affected two different categories of Oromo: the small, educated elite, and the peasants. The government promoted Amharic as the language of state, whilst the Oromo language was banned from public contexts and not allowed in print. The government feared popular involvement in politics, and all political parties and organisations were banned. University students voiced demands for modernisation and land reform whilst the war in Eritrea raised the ‘question of nationalities’, but there was not yet any Oromo nationalist claim for statehood. Among the farmers, opposition to the state centred on land tenure and taxes and on the abuse of authority by the government. Most Oromo-speaking regions had been conquered and incorporated into the empire in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Land was confiscated and granted to warlords, or to local leaders who collaborated with the emperor. The original inhabitants became tribute-paying tenants under the new lords. As most landlords were immigrants to the area, ethnicity was an obvious aspect of property relations. In Wollega, however, local Oromo who had collaborated with the emperor were in control of much of the land and both landlords and share-croppers were Macha Oromo. They shared basic value-orientations by which performance is judged. Memories of the moral economy of an earlier time provided an alternative to the existing situation. Reference to history implied an active selection of elements in the formulation of a critical discourse on power and property that addressed the basic opposition between society and state. The last part of the article describes how educated and farmers met in a political meeting that was organised by the local authorities in 1976 to celebrate the revolution and its land reform. The occasion turned into an intense celebration of local values and, at least to some of the participants, this was a moment of new ethnic awareness and a call to revive gada, the Oromo ritual system. Threatened by ethnic identification, the state responded with brutal repression, and several people were murdered. Shortly after, some activists joined the Oromo Liberation Front to wage guerrilla war against the state.

South Africa's township revolts have generated much excellent research on the central role played by rebellious, urban youth. This article explores a parallel set of intergenerational conflicts that opened up in the marginal rural districts of the Natal Midlands, which were exacerbated by apartheid's forced removals of labour tenants from commercial farming districts to crowded ‘Native Reserves’ in the 1970s. At this time of deepening poverty, elders worried about the rising incidence of juvenile petty crime, particularly amongst the teenagers who increasingly took itinerant, seasonal labour on the commercial farms. Some of these young migrants, unable to find steady factory work at a time of mounting unemployment, also played a leading role in the illicit, sometimes criminal networks of South Africa's growing popular economy. Finally, I show how some of these youths were mobilized by Inkatha during the war against the African National Congress in Johannesburg – often to the revulsion of older men who abhorred their socially harmful, thuggish violence, which spiralled uncontrollably along migrant routes. Thus the political violence was often known as the udlame: a brutal savagery that destroys households, communities and society.

While the conceptual models on conflict, security and regionalism have evolved and augmented with time, East African pastoral relations remain subject to simplistic explanatory analyses that view pastoral conflicts as cross-border community conflicts and small arms as part of their cultural heritage. This article strives to find a more nuanced understanding of the relations of pastoralist communities and the role of arms in the perennial cross-border conflict. It uses a regional security complex (RSC) approach, first proposed by Barry Buzan and subsequently moulded in ‘new regionalism’ perspectives, which emphasizes the intricate web of pastoralist relations shaped by their need for security, where their identity and livelihood (cattle) remain at the centre. Taking this further, it develops the concept of a Karamoja security complex (KSC) as an appropriate explanatory framework. Through historical analysis and primary data collected among the Nyàngatom in Ethiopia, the research reveals a regular and complex pattern of conflict moulded primarily by the fundamental need for security.

In choosing small urban centers for study and arguing that they were strategic for development, we did not suggest that small urban centers were at present generally playing a positive role in rural development, nor that it would necessarily be easy to get them to do so without major changes or even radical transformations of society. The argument was, that if effective rural development were achieved, small urban centers would certainly have to play a crucial part in it. They may therefore act as sensitive barometers of the adequacy or inadequacy of rural development efforts. Combing the literature on small urban centers in Africa, and in Asia and Latin America as well, has certainly convinced this writer that the instances in which small urban centers are playing anything like an adequate positive role are distinctly rare, and most situations convey the very strong impression that quite fundamental transformations of society—of political and economic structures—will be necessary if they are to have any serious chance of doing so. To study small urban centers without paying attention to the macroeconomic and political context in which they are set may therefore be futile.

The custom of shutting young girls up at puberty is not uncommon among Bantu tribes, the period varying from the duration of the first menstruation to a matter of months and even years. In the first case she is merely removed from normal social contacts during a short period of crisis, when certain rites must be performed for her own safety and fertility, and possibly the well-being of society generally, and certain lessons regarding personal conduct, not necessarily heard then for the first time, must be finally driven home in a manner and in an emotional atmosphere calculated to impress them deeply in her consciousness. In the latter cases the idea is that, in addition to undergoing the safeguarding ritual, the girl should afterwards remain in absolute seclusion until the negotiations regarding her marriage are complete and a substantial part of the bride-wealth has been handed over. I am here concerned with the latter.