This article examines the development, early operation and subsequent failure of the Tot-Kolowa Red Cross irrigation scheme in Kenya’s Kerio Valley. Initially conceived as a technical solution to address regional food insecurity, the scheme aimed to scale up food production through the implementation of a fixed pipe irrigation system and the provision of agricultural inputs for cash cropping. A series of unfolding circumstances, however, necessitated numerous modifications to the original design as the project became increasingly entangled with deep and complex histories of land use patterns, resource allocation and conflict. Failure to understand the complexity of these dynamics ultimately led to the project’s collapse as the region spiralled into a period of significant unrest. In tracing these events, we aim to foreground the lived realities of imposed development, including both positive and negative responses to the scheme’s participatory obligations and its wider impact on community resilience.

The ‘title deed fix’ – resurgent globally since the 1990s – is part of a wave of market-led agrarian reforms whose outcomes have been mixed. Kenya was the first African country to experiment – starting six decades ago and continuing today – with state-mandated formal land registration and private titling. Today it is among a handful to begin a transition to a digitized land registry. Behind both paper and electronic land documents, however, is a persistent temporal fiction that undergirds state-backed title registries – namely, a constructed present that is out of sync with intersecting biographical and structural temporalities, and that can efface socially recognized pasts, commitments or testimonials. We analyse some consequences of those temporal dissonances, unstable rights durations, and an ensuing limbo that can last decades, through family land stories shared with us during long-term ethnographic research in Kenya’s fertile central highlands. Especially vulnerable to temporal erasure and dispossession when title deed limbo spans decades are divorced or single women and their children, particularly as farmland and non-agricultural employment become more scarce and land markets overheat. Multitemporal family narratives powerfully illustrate why title deeds of any age are best taken as provisional truths rather than legal certainties, and why tenure security is an unstable and reversible process rather than a present or absent condition.

This article explores the intersection of labour, sexual violence and intimacy in the late nineteenth-century copper mining district of Namaqualand, focusing on the impact of male labourers’ brutalities on local Nama and Baster women. Small in scale, lacking state interference and offering vast employment opportunities to women, Namaqualand’s mines and the towns that grew around them were a key destination for local female labour migration. Due to these unique characteristics, however, women were also exposed to unwanted attention and sexual abuse by male labourers, particularly miners. Women used the Cape’s legal system to protest, but the indifference shown towards their suffering by colonial officials and the public allowed men to use violence without much restraint, rendering women’s legal efforts futile. Ultimately, sexual violence reinforced gendered and racial hierarchies, restricting women’s socio-economic agency and autonomy. The article argues that these dynamics highlight the violent (re)shaping of colonial and patriarchal power asymmetries in the north-western Cape between two major colonial wars after the stabilization of the northern frontier by means of armed conquest.

Indigenous Yorùbá poetry is often defined by such features as context, structure, tonal quality and the performer’s identity. Early taxonomy of the poetry focused on the poetics that could be deduced from a long tradition of practice. Recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies has been more interested in showing the ways in which the poetry is being inflected by encounters with postcolonial modernity. While these recent contributions demonstrate how new forms, such as ewì, distil expressive nuances from the older forms and invent new performative practices to address new publics, such studies encourage a generalization that credits to the new forms all the modern advances recorded in the indigenous forms themselves. Looking at specific indigenous forms in terms of how postcolonial modernity has reshaped them, rather than considering them another set of additions to a new generic category, allows us a clearer view of their transition. I track the inventions and changes in the practice of two Yorùbá forms, ìjálá and Ifá chants, using the performances of Àlàbí Ògúndépò and Yẹmí Ẹlẹ́buìbọn. I rely on ethnographic data to show how mutating audiences and electronic storage and retrieval systems have continually shaped composition and performance, discuss the imperatives of modernity and economy in the performative choices of the artists, and show how the performers simultaneously manage their resistance to and adoption of the modern.

This article asks whether and how gendered violence was part of the quotidian activity of state building in German South West Africa. Investigating the intimate space of a police compound, it gives a micro-historical account of how interracial sexual relations unfolded there, and how policemen’s private, intimate affairs were subject to close scrutiny by the colonial state. Rape – as distinctively masculine violence – posed a notably delicate problem to the legitimacy of the colonial state. The white masculine prerogative needed to be affirmed as the raison d’être of the colonial regime, but disorderly, unprofessional violence had to be controlled for the same reason. The case examined in this article was a rare moment in which an African woman attempted to take part in the discussion over the meaning of sex and violence. Ultimately, her articulation of what intimate, physical interactions meant to her was ignored. Instead, policemen articulated what masculine honour and comradeship meant to them. These discussions over what individual ‘honourable’ (including violent) behaviour implied were also always negotiations over the nature of colonial power and its programme.

This article uses a micro-historical approach to examine an escape and murder among convict labourers between Cape Town and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa in the 1840s. It does so to demonstrate how imperial mobilities and legal conceptions of property crime were interconnected within settler colonial capital and the intimacies of colonial social worlds. Reforms in penal practice in the British Empire – in this instance, adopted in the Cape Colony from Tasmanian experiments in convict labour and moral improvement – formed part of post-abolition shifts in labour control and the management of the itinerant poor, increasingly guided by anxieties over race. Michael O’Brien, the murderer, was a suspected escaped convict from Australia, who claimed to have survived violent encounters in the Pacific as a missionary. His narrative contrasts with the predominantly regional mobilities and crimes of the other Cape convicts – notably stock theft and petty robbery – that occurred in the contested spaces of law, colonialism and property. This article discusses convict narratives around crime and redemption across a maritime empire, and the affective relations of coercion and care between convicts, overseers, constables and superintendents on the smaller scale of a convict station. It further contends that changes in criminal justice and governance in Southern Africa were thus contingent on the intimacies of scale and affect, on connections between the local, the global and the biographical.

All archives have silences, which may come to resonate, even if they may never speak. What is unsaid or unsayable may be understood and appreciated even if never enunciated and never heard. The photographs of the Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele from 1960 to 1980 were taken against a background of violence: the uprising of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), which started before Cameroonian independence and continued for the next decade. The fight against UPC ‘terrorists’ by the Cameroonian state and the French military was marked by violence on all sides. There is no evidence of this in the Toussele archive, which consists of administrative ID portraits and recreational shots depicting friends and family and various displays of intimacy. The Toussele photographic archive shows young people in Mbouda exhibiting the global tropes of modernity. Soon after independence in Ouest Cameroon, both the violence and the promises of 1960s modernity were challenges to traditional sociality. A local reading makes it clear that the violence was ever present in its absence and denial: to perform an event was no small achievement and, like the birth of a child, was to be celebrated and marked by photography. Intimacy was achieved against a background of violence and celebrated for this very reason.

This study is concerned with addressing discrimination in public spaces and interrogates the extent to which the social identity function of a local lingua franca impacted inclusion politics in leadership selections for public institutions in Africa. Guided by social identity and ethnolinguistic identity theories, selecting Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria as a case study, and using the qualitative research technique, this study found a three-level ethno-religious discriminatory categorization – Core Northerners, Peripheral Northerners and Non-Northerners – accommodated within the institution’s power hierarchy. Fluency in Hausa, the local lingua franca in Northern Nigeria, was the common factor. Although the language was not a requirement for appointment, it turned out to be the marker of social identity that positively impacted inclusion politics. With extensive linguistic acculturation, African nation states are better off investing in the propagation of the local lingua franca to address negative discrimination in public spaces.

Following a severe drought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the invasive shrub Prosopis, a kind of mesquite native to South America, was introduced by international organizations to locations across Kenya’s drylands, including the Turkana region in the far north. Prosopis, known as etirae in Turkana, was envisaged as a solution to a range of problems, including deforestation, fuelwood shortages and general environmental deterioration. While exacerbated by drought, these problems were perceived to reflect a much more fundamental crisis, with prevalent views at the time envisaging pastoralism as unsustainable, destructive and in need of overhaul – a narrative dating to colonial times that has since been discredited. Since its introduction, etirae has spread relentlessly, invading riparian land, encroaching on cultivation plots and growing to new heights and thicknesses. Investigating its entanglements with Turkana livelihoods and economic relationships is also a process of understanding how it has braided its way through contested processes of social change, and how it has come to be intertwined with conceptions of cascading crisis quite distinct from the narratives that led to its initial introduction. Implications emerge regarding both the complicated biological residues of past development interventions and the totalizing crisis-oriented narratives that shape drylands development in the current era of climate change.

Most existing literature on the causes of party switching both in Africa and around the world is built on tenuous empirical foundations. The question of why members of parliament (MPs) switch parties has hardly been asked directly either to the MPs themselves or to everyday voters. While MPs could lie or give more favourable accounts that suit their interests, putting this question to them could uncover other crucial factors that have fallen through the cracks in previous theorizations. This article takes a triangulation approach by drawing from the viewpoints of researchers, voters and MPs themselves to give a more holistic picture of the drivers of party defection. Through a combination of a nationwide representative survey and elite and key informant interviews, I situate the trend of party switching in Nigeria within broader comparative literature on the subject, showing how Nigeria conforms and deviates from existing conceptualizations of party switching around the world. I find evidence of interactions between formal and personal drivers of party switching in Nigeria. I also discover that while a majority of Nigerian voters are suspicious of defectors, defectors point accusing fingers at the lack of internal democracy within political parties, thereby exposing an issue not adequately addressed in existing literature.

Countering the focus on crisis and irregularity that frames dominant representations of African migration to Europe, this article explores Gambian migrant women’s journeys of return. It is argued that Gambian women returnees’ financial resources, levels of education, kinship relations and social networks have positioned them in such a way that they can benefit from the opportunities and possibilities in The Gambia, thereby influencing their decisions to return. Significantly, their positions have helped them to negotiate and, in some instances, challenge gendered expectations and relations in their experiences on return. Further, the exchange of knowledge and their transnational networks and connections place the global South and the global North as co-constitutive elements in the development of their work and their gendered subjectivities. As such, I focus on the analytical purchase that the concept of return affords, as well as its political possibilities. The article contributes to existing scholarship on migration by highlighting the importance of returnees’ multiple subjectivities in both their decisions to return and their experiences on return. In addition, I foreground the contributions that returnees make to the places to which they have migrated, thereby challenging representations of African migrants as deficient and of Africa as a place of absence.

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.

In this article I explore changing state–citizen relationships in Mauritius. To do so, I outline and provide analysis of the system through which this Indian Ocean island has historically managed its diversity – a process that I call conscripting communalism. Conscripting communalism was formulated at independence in a context of behavioural predictions for the future that the internet era has challenged in powerful ways. To illustrate my argument, I explore three specific moments when ethnic and religious discourses were surpassed by collective concern within a rapidly authoritarianizing state: first, the sinking of the Wakashio oil tanker off the coast of Mauritius in 2020, which resulted in national solidarity towards the environment rather than communal violence; second, proposed legislation put forward by the Mauritian Information and Communication Technology Authority (ICTA) in 2021, which attempted to enable state surveillance of social media and which was soundly resisted by both domestic and external parties. And finally, I explore 2022 accusations that the Mauritian government authorized the installation of digital interception technology by representatives of the Indian state on one of the country’s fibre optic cables. The article argues that Mauritius represents an important site of analysis of the tensions between competing global visions of human rights, political autonomy, surveillance, solidarity and expectations for the future and the role of the internet in shaping these competing visions. I explore how new technologies have become the tools of both repression and resistance. The implications ripple far beyond the island.

Africa’s regional archives offer crucial records to explore the continent’s postcolonial past. Although these archives are often difficult to locate and access and are exposed to several challenges that might even threaten their existence, this article presents a solid case for reconsidering their importance. Recent trends, aptly labelled ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, have mainly pointed to problems and often to the limited accessibility of state archives in some regional and local contexts. This article instead engages with their potential, discussing four case studies in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville. Results stemming from these case studies are brought into contact with wider debates on custodial cultures and the regional archives’ role in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The intention is to provide a more positive and empirically based overview of research possibilities at regional archives and ultimately to change the nature of our approach to these resources.

Exploring the ‘hollow’ character of middle-class status in contemporary Kenya, this article shows how upwardly mobile young Kenyans struggle to cope with the expectations for distribution that their displays of achievement create. Focusing on the urbanizing peripheries of Nairobi, it shows how accusations of envy (wivu) made about poorer friends and relatives reflect their anxieties about failing to act as the providers they are expected to be. Anticipation of the disappointment and resentment of their would-be dependants encourages them to withdraw from friendships and kinship relations in their home neighbourhoods, and seek instead an impersonal life in new urban enclaves closer to Nairobi. The avoidance of obligation is justified through discourses of individual effort and achievement, while poorer peers and relations are criticized for looking to rely on others. The article shows how such tensions over obligation and desires for withdrawal illuminate the fragility of Kenya’s emerging middle class and the ‘ironies of accomplishment’ – that their very precarity denies these Kenyans the respect and status they desire in their neighbourhood homes.

In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods – fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance – in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of ‘bundling’, reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon’s historical and linguistic scaffolding. We take this phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of socio-economic exchange and growth, one that is distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of an unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, reflects an aesthetics in which both material value and social relationships are imagined to arise through thickenings of persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. The article suggests that bundling offers conceptual resources to imagine growth otherwise, as a process unfolding in ways that complicate and clog conventional economic imaginaries.

Against the background of post-Cold War trade and media liberalization, this article examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building the woman’s name as a digital ‘fashionista’, in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is actualized among women of status and rank, young women can fashion relations of matronage, opening up avenues of upward social mobility. To reach out to women of status and rank, young women circulate images of their styles to mobilize digital follower networks of peers, kin and strangers, drawing on their skills, status and knowledge. This mobilization in turn relies on the actual and potential benefits that sharing a fashionista image can bring to the follower. Thus, I argue, interdependencies between stylish leaders and their followers are key to making and maintaining a name as a digital fashionista. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks generates potentialities for young women living in Yaoundé to fashion matronage relations and social mobility. More broadly, the framing of followers as a form of wealth-in-people provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers, illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.

This article analyses the racial framing of the humanitarian encounter between Turkish and African Muslims as a trope of first contact. Intensifying humanitarian relations with Africa south of the Sahara, in tandem with the foreign policy of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), has led to the emergence of a racialized affective regime in Turkey that endows Islamic philanthropy with new racial meanings. This article argues that racial subjects such as the White Muslim and the Black Muslim are produced through the affective labour of humanitarian volunteers and others, who narrativize and circulate experiences of first contact in Turkey. Based on a multi-sited ethnography in Turkey, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia and Benin, this article explores race-making as affective labour. Taking on Berg and Ramos-Zayas’s call for an anthropological theorization of race and affect, it develops a critical framework to examine how humanitarian voluntarism produces differently racialized subjects. In order to do so, this analysis draws on James Baldwin’s insights into the racial and affective politics of the first contact to discuss how Turkish humanitarians build on and alter the racialized affective regime Baldwin describes.

Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African-American Muslims have travelled or relocated to the rural yet renowned city of Medina Baye, Senegal. They were invited there by Shaykh Hassan Cisse, a Senegalese Islamic scholar and leader in the Tijani tariqa (Sufi order). This article focuses on the experiences of African-American and fellow diaspora Black Muslims living and learning with African Muslims in the Tijani hub of Medina Baye. It interrogates the assumptions, expectations and misunderstandings that characterize relationships between the two groups. I argue that, as members of the Tijani tariqa, diaspora Black disciples become integrated within the local system of collective care modelled by African disciples. Complicating analyses of African–diasporic exchanges that tend to differentiate and hierarchize the interconnected economic hardships facing diaspora Black and continental African communities, I argue that the relationship between these groups illustrates the role of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse’s branch of the Tijani tariqa as a counterhegemonic social movement offering new paradigms of social and economic reciprocity that enable Black Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic to mitigate the contemporary impacts of racial capitalism and global apartheid.